NZIFF 2019 Tranche 2

Entering the second week; while a little less frantic, there's a couple of late night sessions that have been a bit taxing; the fact one is a remarkably brain-bending bit of cinema really didn't help. Alas, one rule of cinema remains constant: the teens and 20-somethings at a big-budget superhero movie are generally pretty polite, while the film festival seems to bring out a cohort of aging, entitled pricks who waltz in late, chat amongst themselves, and futz with their phones.

Angelo

It's difficult to judge many aspects of Angelo. Viewed as a conventional film, it's not, I would say, very good. Viewed as film engaged in formal experimentation it is interesting, if perhaps unoriginal. Seen as a biography it is equal parts interesting, bitterly disappointing, and ultimately perpetuating the kind of racist thinking it is trying to form a polemic against.

To begin: the film itself is largely staged like a play. Many stage conventions seem to be used in how the characters interact, and when I left I would have sworn it was a very straight adaption of a play. It happily toys with the conventions of period pieces; some scenes are shot in careful costume drama recreations, while others are not with actors in period costume in modern buildings. These are mildly unconventional choices, but to be honest, I found more distracting than interesting.

That's a minor quibble, though, compared to the meat of the movie. It tells the life of Angelo Soliman. The real Angelo was abducted from Africa and enslaved in Europe; the film mirrors this, but deviates substantially on a number of key details. In the film his European name is imposed on him by the Marchioness who moved him from life as a slave to life as a servant; in reality, it's one he chose for himself. It's not surprising that the film also abridges his progression through French, Sicilian, and ultimately Viennese society. His successes outside of performance are downplayed; there is little sense of accomplishments first as an increasingly senior and trusted servant and ultimately a teacher to royalty and the confident of an Emporer. His marriage is presented as a break with his position in society; in reality a man who had risen to be able to marry the sister of a Duke was living cast out of court. And while the film notes that he became a Freemason - an important social cachet in the 18th century - he actually became a Grand Master.

Where the film does dovetail back to reality is the disgraceful, revolting treatment he received in death: his body was seized by the Imperial Natural History collection, taxidermied, and presented as the caricature of an African savage. The film rammed home the horror of this (although not, alas, apparently well enough to stop the middle aged trio behind me from giggling through the scenes until I told them to shut up or leave), and laid bare that, for all his numerous accomplishments, he would always ultimately be judged on his origins and colour.

Which, to come around to my earlier point, is why I dislike the degree to which the film presents Angelo's life as essentially being a combination of happenstance and the engineering of a French noblewoman's determination to create an educated black man; his accomplishments were considerable and remarkable and by presenting him with so little agency, and undercutting the success he achieved for himself in life, the film both undersells the racism that was most obvious around his death, and by undercutting his story in its own right, perpetuates the racism it tries to critique.

Finally, finishing on the note of the destruction of his remains as the result of war, the film chooses to omit the success of his daughter - last seem screaming hysterically and ineffectually against his fate, a mad, limping figure - and his grandchildren who became accomplished in their own right. One might as well end Schindler's List by noting his bankruptcies and divorces rather than celebrating the lives he saved.

High Life

A succession of films at the NZIFF have convinced me that Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart, largely mocked as jokes for their performances in the Twilight series, are actually very good actors who are now enjoying the freedom to make good movies with gratifying roles for themselves. I was impressed by Stewart in Personal Shopper, for example, where she is excellent; Pattinson puts in an excellent turn here in this sci-fi flick. It's difficult to talk about it too much without giving away all the interesting points, but the premise is simple enough: a spaceship crewed by murderers, who have taken on the mission to escape a death sentence, is travelling at near light speed toward a black hole, in order to observe it and return. There would already be quite enough tension in this even without Juliette Binoche who is in a role I'd associate more with Catherine Deneuve: an infanticidal doctor who is obsessed with creating a perfect child by breeding the prisoners together, whether they're keen on the idea or not.

The set design is delightfully 70s in many details, deliberately so; for verisimilitude a researcher who specialises in black holes was consulted around aspects of the story. The acting, particularly for Pattinson and Binoche, is spot-on (and for Binoche a hell of a contrast to the previous evening's Doubles Vies). There's a lot to unpack in the relationships between the characters, and the contrast between Monte's (Pattison) relentless ascetic self-discipline and the rest of the cast must be one of the prime talking-points from the film, as is his relationship with the baby we see at the start of the film. You could talk about what it says about stress, about sex, about crime and punishment...

That said, I found some decisions in the film questionable: the "fuck box", a kind of high-tech telepathic masturbatorium provided to the inmate crew, gets you a lushly rendered session with naked Juliette Binoche, but the same treatment is not for any of the other crew. Why Binoche? Why no male members (as it were)? In a not dissimilar vein: Monte's contempt for sex, for the flesh, his militant attachment to notions of taboo. These are interesting aspects of the film, but in our broader social context of no-fap November and incels, or a world where "I deny them my precious bodily fluids" might be considered by some notable sub-cultures not as a risible parody but a heroic stance, well, in this world of 2019 it's not hard for me to imagine a veneration the filmmakers (hopefully) did not intend.

Nevertheless I highly recommend this; one of the must-sees of the festival in my opinion.

Long Day's Journey Into Night

I saw this at a late session on a Tuesday, after a break-neck weekend and a Monday double-header. Perhaps not ideal for such a complex film; so much of it is messing with the audience's perception of characters and time and reality, and gleefully toying with form and narrative.

An example: the last stretch of the film begins with our protagonist entering a film theatre to watch a film and wait for a karaoke performance by the woman he's looking for; he slips on his 3D glasses, and begins watching the film Long Day's Journey Into Night. It's not clear when the film ends (or whether it does, and everything that follows is on the screen, the dream of the protagonist, or actual events). Our protagonist, continuing to cut between older and more youthful versions of himself, realises he can't get out of the theatre, which is in fact a maze. He encounters a nameless 12 year old boy - perhaps his aborted son? - who plays ping pong with him, calling back to his desire to teach a son to play that game. The boy reveals the way out of the maze is back through the journey: down from the city, through the prison, and so on. When the protagonist finally does get to the karaoke night - via a surreal set of events - he helps an older version of a woman, who insists she is not the woman he seeks - escape the city; he takes a watch from her in return, which he then gives to a younger version of the woman, who gives him a sparkler and takes him to the beautiful house of lovers in the village, only to discover it has been burned down, something the older woman's husband complains she had done recently.

The whole film is like this! A beautiful, complicated, endlessly twisting narrative; I'm not sure if being sleepy made it harder to watch, or perfectly attuned me to its dreamlike unreality. I will be seeing this again - because it seems almost certain that it will reward another viewing.

Capital in the 21st Century

Less a simple adaptation of Thomas Piketty's important work as a popularisation and extension of it. Piketty, if you haven't heard of him, is a French economist who started getting some serious traction outside of academia for his work Capital in the 21st Century; it gained traction in the midst of this decade as, post-GFC, it stopped becoming heresy in the English-speaking world to ask if Friedman and his acolytes really had been the final word in how to run the world. His greatest concern is that we are unwinding the great equalisations that ran through the 19th and 20th centuries, returning to conditions more akin to the 18th century. The film - by New Zealand director Justin Pemberton - teases out key themes from the weighty tome, and bringing in comment from experts across a range of fields: historians, psychologists, political scientists, and so on - to expand on their own areas of expertise as they relate; one of the more notable examples was a psych researcher who describe a large-scale experiment with Monopoly, where players were given a significant advantage by a flip of a coin at the start of the game. Tellingly, these players always won - and over the course of the game because more arrogant and unpleasant to their opponent. All of them attributed their success to their own capabilities; none of them noted that the coin toss granted them twice the in-game income specified in the rules.

A well-executed documentary, engaging and very relevant to the world in which we live. In a better world it might get equal time with the Mike Hoskings of the world on broadcast media, but it seems sadly unlikely.

In Fabric

I'm not entirely sure how best to describe In Fabric; "a horror film about consumerism" is both accurate and completely inadequate all at the same time. In many ways it harkens back to high-concept Euro horrors of the 70s, but is never as tediously pretentious as anyone who has sat through one of those might fear^[1], and, for creep factor there were moments that took me back to being a pre-teen watching Sapphire and Steel alone in the top story of a house, late at night, which is a high watermark of tension.

The first thing about the film that is immaculate is its staging: someone obviously took a hell of a lot of joy in assembling the sets which have just the right sort of televisions, answering machines, ads, furniture, and so on to invoke a late 70s through early 80s England.

Mr Jones

Mr Jones is a hagiography, and I mean that in the most pejorative sense of the term.

It covers the portion of the life of journalist Gareth Jones, who is one of the earliest westerners to report on the horrific reality of the Holodormor, the famine engineered by Stalin's Soviet Union against Ukraine. Its consequences - mass death, people reduced to cannibalism - are not, sadly, unique; they are similar to any number of other colonial famines inflicted on subject peoples throughout history, but of course the whole point of Soviet Marxism was supposed to be against such horrors.

So why am I so negative? Well, the story itself certainly deserves telling - but the film makers, not content with praising Jones for his courage and integrity immediately undercut the latter attribute by simply making shit up, and lying about flaws he himself reported.

In the former category, one might categorise the amount of time the film spends asserting that more-or-less the whole of George Orwell's work is rooted in his admiration of and enlightenment by Jones. There's no real evidence for what's presented in the film, either in biographical material of Orwell, nor that I could find about Jones himself. One could chalk this up to a certain over-enthusiasm by the makers of the film, but for the other bum note, a straight-up lie.

Jones himself discloses - in a rather brutal bit of self-reflection - that when he first travels to Ukraine he is amused by the desperate interest some children on a train show in an orange that he's eating, he teases them. This is, in the context of what is going on, appalling behaviour. Jones himself has subsequently noted how ashamed he was after the fact. In the film, though, this scene is rewritten, completely apart from Jones' own account, to be a kindly Jones giving starving children a treat. It's completely dishonest, and makes it hard to take anything else the film presents about Jones seriously.

Peterloo

Most costume dramas, certainly of this century, tend to focus on the lives of the well-to-do; tremendous effort is put into the exacting reproduction of Lady Foofoo's dress and Lord Bumlinger's mansion for us to swoon over. Little goes into more ordinary folks, except as they interact with their nominal betters. Peterloo is a complete departure from that - unsurprising, given it is directed by Mike Leigh.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire

I bumped into a friend after this one, and she observed that it must be the film with the fewest male roles in it she's seen; thinking about it, she's right.

The Whistlers

The biggest problem with this film is that, during the scenes where the corrupt cop is learning whistling speech the instructions provided by a Spanish gangster were so good I had to work hard not to try them out in the theatre.

"Wait," you ask, "the what now?"

Let me explain.

The Whistlers cuts between Bucharest and the Canary Islands, and between the points of view of various crooks and cops; at the beginning we understand that the cop has come to the Canary Islands to learn the whistling language of the area; this is in order to help a group of cooks to spring one of their gang from prison. By using the whistling language - adapted to Romanian - they can communicate across the city while remaining immune to any surveillance. After all, how would the (honest-ish) police know what's a bird call, and what is planning a break-out? It's a neat premise, and the film - amongst its many virtues - gives solid screen time to the teaching of the language (finger in mouth like you're holding a pistol, trying to shoot your own ear off, lips over teeth like you're an old man with no teeth, and vowels and consonants collapse down to a similar subset of those in regular Spanish). But beyond the novelty value, it's a fantastic crime caper movie, cutting back and forward in time, and with multiple points of view. Our understanding is unreliable, and we are beset by double cross after double cross, always aiming to keep us off-guard.

Highly recommended.

The Miracle of The Little Prince

The Little Prince is one of the most notable works of French literature, and is (apparently) one of the most translated books in the world. This focuses on one particular use of these translations: helping preserve languages by providing a book that children and their parents (or grandparents) can enjoy together.

The documentary focuses on four examples, leading with the most optimistic case: translation into the Tamazight language of the Berber peoples of Morocco. While accepted formally as a language of Morocco in 2011, years of neglect or hostility in favour of the colonial languages of first Arabic and then French - and then Arabic again - have left it under-used, with little reading material; numerous people interviewed for the film spoke of the affinity the story has for Berber culture: extensive passages are in the desert, of course, but the animistic relationships between The Little Prince and his fox and rose call back to traditional Berber culture; as such the story resonates for the people meant to be reading it with their children. This passage of the documentary is very upbeat, both about the increasing acceptance of the Berber culture in Morocco as a whole, and the role of the translation in helping to sustain and renew it; the information presented about Tamazight is interesting.

From an optimism point of view, though, this is sadly the high point of the documentary. Moving into Finland we hear about a translation into Sami; the translator is a middle-aged woman, living with her mother, who recounts the brutal treatment of Sami people and culture in Finland: she was required to attend a boarding school from high school age onward, with the use of Sami absolutely forbidden, even outside the class. Speaking no Finnish, she struggled in class, and was ruthlessly bullied and mocked by classmates and teachers, and describes The Little Prince as a personal escape from what sounds like a hellish period of her life. Her mother aids her with this work, acting as what the translator calls her "personal dictionary", supplementing both the translator's knowledge of Sami and the published dictionaries with her own, older and practical day-to-day Sami. And that's probably the most depressing part of this story: there is no sign, unlike in Morocco, of support from the government for this effort (note that Finland provides generous support to the Swedish-speaking minority, while having a long history of trying to eliminate the existence of the Sami), or widespread adoption of the translator's work - moreover, the fact that the translator is considerably less fluent than her mother, and that the official dictionaries of Sami fail to capture real-world use of the language, suggests the Finns are on the verge of success: the collapse of Sami into a non-viable language and culture.

Tibetan is the tale of a people being wiped out: forced out of their home country, their language and culture being eliminated, and replaced by colonisation; it focuses on a man living abroad, the only place that is safe for a Tibetan who is determined to speak his own language. A moment we witness that perhaps sums up the awfulness of it all is when he is speaking to his mother who advises him not to return to see her, for his own safety.

The biggest surprise for me with the survival of Nahuat in El Salvador is that, well, it survives. The Spanish colonisation, the well-documented enslavement and deliberate destruction and forced Westernisation of the Americas was comprehensive and brutal. El Salvador itself was a byword in the late 20th century for US-backed death squads committing atrocities for decades. And yet, here, a pre-contact language clings on.

The Day Shall Come

The Miracle of The Little Prince was depressing in parts. Les Misérables ended bleakly. Neither of them holds a candle to what, in this effort by Chris Morris, is supposed to be a comedy. That may not be intentional. It's a black comedy, to be sure, but it's the most depressing thing I've watching in... well, in a long time. Ys, there were parts I laughed at. But overall it hewed too closely to reality to make me feel anything other than utterly crushed by the end of it and, for long stretches, to have a deep discomfort that I was perhaps being induced to laugh at the wrong people.

Why so bleak? Well, the film is a jab at the War on Terror; it focuses on Moses, a clearly mentally ill man who formed a black separatist community when a duck told him to. He has a handful of followers, and an indulgent wife who is on board with his ideas of self-reliance and the eventual downfall of white oppression, while understanding perfectly well that her husband is an ill man. The action in the film comes when, after a failed operation, the local FBI are desperate to find a quality terrorist bust to boost the careers of the officers. Poor Moses is that bust; induced by an elaborate con featuring FBI informants (including a paedophile kept on the books as as an useful Arab who will act whatever arms dealing or terrorist sympathiser roles are required). Moses resists - his movement is non-violent - but as a succession of pressures threaten to destroy his commune, he ultimately succumbs and, along with those around him, is destroyed.

The problem is that this is all too real. It's not that far from what has happened and will no doubt continue to happen, and on top of that, poor Moses feels to me too pitiable to be a good figure of fun; I feel like a few too many jokes fall on the cruel side when considering his character. The only thing I found an unmixed joy in this was the performance by Danielle Brooks as Venus, his wife. She shares his goals within the limits of non-violence, while being realistic about his mental state; she manages to be at once loving, sane, and realistic, and to look after herself and their daughter.

1. It's worth noting a few films of the past couple of French and International film festivals seem to be very deliberately hewing to the style of 70s low to midbudget concept movies; how enjoyable they are, for me, is the degree to which they can avoid being completely identical to that sort of thing. The more faithful, the more I regret the time spent in front of them, I have to say. ↩︎