We’re about halfway through the Melbourne International Film Festival now, and my own experience has been only average. This isn’t a reflection on the festival: it’s just the way the cards have fallen in the vast lucky dip that happens when you have to choose from a range of movies before the usual pre-release buzz. (It’s a little frightening to realise how much you rely on distributors and the media to direct your viewing).
My experience so far has been of several middling films, one good one, and one really wretched one. Which is probably a strike-rate reflecting the overall quality of any given sample of movies. But I do hope the second week throws me up something really excellent. But here’s what I’ve seen so far.
A Scanner Darkly (Richard Linklater)
Linklater’s sort-of animated film is an adaptation of a Phillip K Dick novel, about an undercover cop in near future California who comes off second best from his own addiction. I haven’t read the source novel, but I’ve read enough of Dick to know that Linklater’s film is a much more faithful adaptation of Dick’s vision than the typical Hollywood takes on his work (Bladerunner, Total Recall, Minority Report, etc). Which is both a strength and a weakness. It has the slightly alienating quality of Dick’s writing down pat: lots of great ideas, but an off-putting disregard for character and narrative. The “animated” technique Linklater uses (which is actually little more than a really extreme cinematography, since we’re seeing live-action actors disguised to look animated) is a bit of a needless gimmick. Not bad, but not great.
The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (Sophie Fiennes)
I thought this presentation of Lacanian film theorist Slavoj Zizek’s theories might be interesting. I’ve recently been reading Noel Carroll’s great book Mystifying Movies, in which he comprehensively destroys old-school Lacanian film theory, so I was wondering whether an “academic rock star” who proclaims himself Lacanian might have moved into more interesting areas. Nope. Zizek’s presentation is fun enough, but it’s just the standard Lacanian melange of dubious psychoanalytical conceits applied haphazardly to various films, without any attempt to shape it into a theoretical model that is either useful or convincing. It’s like listening to the most annoying person in your first year film studies course (the one who had read ahead into the psychonalytical film theory and absorbed it wholeale without ever critiquing it). Still, it is fun to watch the clips and see Zizek putter about Bodega Bay (from The Birds) in a motor boat. Incidentally, The MIFF organisers get a black mark for programming what seemed to be three episodes of a TV series into one 150 minute slog and trying to pretend it was an actual movie. Not good enough: it’s not fair to the material, or the audience (if I’d known it wasn’t intended as a feature I definitely would have seen something else).
The Wild Blue Yonder (Werner Herzog)
I was trying to think whether there is any director who is so esteemed as both a director of fiction and documentary as Werner Herzog: even allowing that it is a long time since his really highly regarded fictional work (Fitzcarraldo, Aguirre: The Wrath of God, etc) I couldn’t come up with anyone. The Wild Blue Yonder blends both sides of his work, using an on-screen narrator (a wild-eyed Brad Dourif) to tell a science fiction story that is illustrated with various bits of out-of-context documentary footage. For a while it’s really fun: some of Herzog’s editorial choices are inspired and funny, and the segments with Dourif (particularly the visit to the alien’s “city”) show Herzog’s eye for finding weird real world locations hasn’t dulled since Stroszek. In its second half, however, Herzog pretty much just settles down to giving us documentary footage (of NASA astronauts and deep sea divers) with musical accompaniment. He’s obviously trying to transform the footage into a 2001-esque mood piece, but at the end of the day it’s still just footage with music over it.
Fearless (Ronny Yu)
My favorite bit of the Festival program is the spiel in very fine print on director Ronny Yu’s career under the listing for Fearless: “His films include… Freddy vs Jason.” Well, the new film from the director of Freddy vs Jason has got subtitles, so it must be art, right? Well, maybe. But it is fun. Fearless continues the post-Crouching Tiger trend of big-budget, prestige kung fu movies that are partially American backed and aiming for arthouse distribution in the west. Yu is no match for directors such as Ang Lee and Zhang Yimou who have directed previous efforts along these lines, but he does have Jet Li, who is in good form here as both a performer and a kung fu artist. I was attracted to this because the program offered a “return to the classic, stripped-back kung fu style typified by the early films of Jackie Chan and Jet Li.” It isn’t really that like early Chan – there’s still a little bit of wire work and a few unnecessary bullet-time like camera moves – but it certainly is back to basics when compared to something like Kung Fu Hustle. The fights are pretty good, the story involving enough, and Yu manages to make the whole thing feel nice and epic, with attractive locations, sets, and production design. A lot of fun.
Tidelands (Terry Gilliam)
I really hated this movie. It isn’t reprehensible, or stupid, or otherwise bad in any of the usual ways. It just doesn’t work at all. It tells the story of small girl, the daughter of junkie parents, who ends up faring for herself in an empty farmhouse, eventually befriending a pair of eccentric neighbours. There’s a really good idea in the way the film reflects her deteriorating mental health by exploring her inner life and showing her play becoming increasingly warped and unhealthy. Unfortunately, it’s just about unwatchable despite beautiful cinematography and Gilliam’s good eye. The first half, in which we watch the girl play and share in her elaborate fantasy world, has its grotesque elements but mixes them withy a syrupy whimsy that recalls Spielberg at his worst. It’s slow and very dull. The second half livens up, but becomes increasingly difficult to watch as it delves into some really morbid humour and issues of inappropriate sexual relationships that it doesn’t know how to resolve. It all adds up to a miserable experience. I can’t see who the audience for this is, and find it difficult to imagine it getting a release.