Cinematically Inclined: “Martha Marcy May Marlene”

Sometimes, the most disturbing horror films are the ones where the monsters aren’t visceral or supernatural. They are the ones who you encounter on the streets, in the guise of seemingly decent human beings, who promise security, comfort or whatever else you think you need, in the form of a warm smile and a kind demeanour. Long after you encounter these people, once they have burrowed their way into your subconscious, you will find yourself still tormented by them as they ravage the tissue-like confines of your psyche.

This is what happens to Martha, the titular character in Martha Marcy May Marlene. In reality, the four names all belong to the young woman embodied by Elizabeth Olsen (sister of the tycoon Olsen twins), a recent escapee from a small but sinister cult. At the beginning of the film, we see her taking flight from the ramshackle farm the cult inhabits, where everyone sleeps in segregated but close counters. Martha has been missing for two years when she musters the courage to phone her sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson), a well-to-due Manhattanite married to a pretentious English architect (Hugh Dancy, just the right amount of pompous), to pick her up from a remote town in the Catskills. Lucy takes Martha to her well-appointed Connecticut country cottage, a lakefront property that causes Martha to remark that it is far too much space for just two people. It is there that Martha and Lucy reconnect, although judging from their rather awkward exchanges, they may not have been all that close to begin with. Martha’s behaviour becomes increasingly shocking and may be the result of severe shock. It starts with her going for a swim completely naked in an area with a lot of family vacation homes. When Lucy and Tom make love, Martha simply climbs into bed with them because she didn’t like to sleep alone. At a dinner party with a very tony crowd, Martha has a very public and intense breakdown.

Sister act: Olsen, left, and Paulson, right

We discover that in the two years Martha has presumably spent entirely in the cult’s toxic presence, she has lost social cues and become increasingly paranoid. The cult is headed by the charismatic Patrick (Oscar nominee John Hawkes of Winter’s Bone), a leader who is less messianic than he is simply a sorcerer who has cast a particularly powerful spell on lost boys and girls. We can assume that Martha was a vulnerable and psychologically malleable teenager when she arrives at this unnamed cult, as she seems to have picked up social cues and behaviors from the orgies and brutal target practices that take place there. Patrick christens her “Marcy May” and promptly “cleanses” her by raping her while she’s sleeping. Eventually, “Marcy” becomes subtly accepting of the social mores in this collective, becoming convinced that the “cleansing” was a beautiful ritual necessary for her to reach her potential, and soon initiates another girl into the same process. She proclaims it to be a liberating and life-altering experience.

Martha Marcy May Marlene is a film of firsts, in particular for both director Sean Durkin and star Olsen. Durkin, who won the coveted Best Director award at Sundance for this film, floods the screen with white noise and uncomfortably long periods of silence and stillness. There is no score and the music is entirely diagetic. The effect is that we experience the events in the film, in flashbacks to the farm and in the present, the way Martha does. Durkin dispenses with easy establishing shots and instead uses light and nondescript architecture to deliberately confuse the present with the past, so that we don’t know if we are looking back to the horror of Martha’s cult experience or her current inability to process social cues in the present. While some of these shots are just a little too long, they create the sense that somehow, when things are just a little too quiet, you never know what is going to happen. The fear is never that the cult comes back to find Martha in her Connecticut hideout, but whether or not some awful memory is triggered. Martha’s mental state deteriorates so that she can no longer distinguish past from present. Her existence is one long and vividly awful morning after.

Cinematically Inclined: "Circumstance"

Ed. N.: This article originally appeared in my series of film reviews for the Vancouver International Film Festival, and has been edited slightly for the commercial release.

Atafeh (Nikhol Boosheri) and Shireen (Sarah Kazemy) are teenagers living in Tehran. Shireen lives with her uncle and it is strongly implied that her parents left Iran due to their “subversive” ideas. Atafeh is from a well-to-do Ismaili family, to accomplished professional parents. For fun, her father tests her knowledge of classical recordings (Pablo Casals is a particular favourite, it seems). Her older brother Mehran (Reza Sixo Safai) is a former junkie, fresh from detox, who has discovered Allah. Atafeh and Shireen fall in love and dream of escaping their circumstances, fancying not only each other but a life together in Dubai. Meanwhile, Mehran’s rehabilitation has given way to an increasingly fundamental point of view, one worlds away from his old party days. Coupled with his growing erotic obsession with Shireen, he becomes more dangerous as he grows increasingly sure of himself in his new identity, and suspects that the girls are up to something in private. The girls also have regular clubbing friends, including two closeted gay men, one of whom is intent on dubbing Milk into Persian for distribution on the black market.

 This is a film on contemporary Iran and the dichotomy between the outward display of conservative values in public, contrasted with the exciting underground nightlife that can only be accessed with passwords and subtle nods of the head for the initiated. This underworld is dancing on a knife’s edge, as the morality police could swoop in at any moment, ready to make arrests and shut the joint down.

Despite the temptation to make the film into a heavy-handed lecture on the lack of LGBT (and for that matter women’s) rights in parts of the Middle East, director Maryam Keshavarz brings a light touch to the work, almost as if she were caressing the most erotic part of the human body, wherever it might be (on you). To heighten the forbidden love and just how dangerous the lovers’ predicament is, the camera switches stocks every so often, shifting the focus to an unknown CCTV feed, demonstrating that they could be caught and punished anywhere, anytime, for lesser offences such as playing western music too loudly in their car or letting too thick a lock of hair peek out from underneath their veils. Imagine the consequences if the true nature of their love were exposed. Keshavarz understands that sometimes, all you need is a look in your eye, or the unspoken presence of a key character in a scene, that gives you all need to know. This is a film so intimate that it’s almost as if we were eavesdropping on inner monologue.

That this is Keshavarz’s directorial debut, one filmed in secret in Beirut and with a powder keg of a subject matter, makes this an even more remarkable accomplishment. The actors and creative team, all of whom are from Iran or of Iranian descent, made "last visits" to their homeland, because once the authorities see this film, they may never be allowed to return to Iran without facing serious penal consequences, all of which are legally sanctioned. That, folks, is dedication and absolute fearlessness.

Director Keshavarz with the cast, receiving the Sundance
Audience Award in January 2011

Circumstance received the Audience Award at Sundance and is easily one of the best films of the year. The film was presented at VIFF with co-sponsor Vancouver Queer Film Festival, with star (and recent Best Actress winner at the LA LGBT Film Festival) Boosheri present to introduce her breakthrough performance.

Circumstance opens in limited commercial release today in Vancouver, having enjoyed a healthy run in New York, Los Angeles and Toronto in the last few weeks. For more information, check out the film’s website and this thoughtful New York Times article. The website lists five things you can do in a checklist to build awareness of the film, and to raise awareness of this pressing issue of human rights. Given that creating art in certain parts of the world can lead to consequences as grotesque as this, sometimes making make-belief hits a little too close to home.

Master Class: Maya Plisetskaya’s “Bolero”

The term “masterpiece” gets thrown around far too often these days. While I have seen it applied to cuisine, architecture and two-dimensional visual art, it’s not just a static finished product, but a performance, a live event that is best seen in motion.

With the grand re-opening of Moscow’s hallowed Bolshoi Theater this week, one cannot help but think of the most well-known ballets danced on the stage, including Swan Lake, Spartacus and The Nutcracker, all of which have roots in Russia. The theatre, however, produced no greater star in the twentieth century than Maya Plisetskaya.

Born in 1925 and still alive today, Plisetskaya faced a number of obstacles on her way to becoming one of the most seminal stars of the Bolshoi. Her father was executed during the Stalinist purges of the late 1930s, her mother was sent to a gulag, and she fought against anti-Semitism and the supposed limitations of her physicality – mainly that she was a fiery redhead with milky skin – to earn international acclaim and the rare honour of being named prima ballerina assoluta, a title conferred to very few dancers to this day. Retiring in 1990, Plisetskaya never slowed down as a ballerina, having danced the lead in Swan Lake as late as 1986 to considerable acclaim, at the age of 61. Maya Plisetskaya is considered the Maria Callas of the ballet world.

While there is no consensus for which of her performances ranks as the greatest, for me her finest work was the free-form, modern dance routine set to Ravel’s Bolero in 1975. At the age of 50, Plisetskaya showed she was in top form in this fifteen-minute performance, which she danced as a solo piece accompanied by 40 men onstage. Set on an elevated but unadorned white dance space against a black background, she danced the piece barefoot, her hair tied back and pulled away from her face, dressed in a simple white tank top and black trousers. The set incorporated traditional ballet points and positions but infused in a modern style. What makes the piece so compelling is that Plisetskaya may be accompanied by dozens of other dancers mirroring her movement, the first and only focus is on the prima ballerina herself. Her continual rocking and swaying at certain points, rhythmically timed to the syncopations of the orchestra, create a mesmerizing effect that demonstrated an absolute control over every nuance of her body, from the smallest toe to her fingertips, to the top of her head. One could almost imagine that her supreme mastery might have compelled her to make her hair stand on end by sheer force of will.

The point of the piece is not to recreate verisimilitude, or time and place. It’s a free-form dance piece that is meant to showcase only one thing: Maya Plisetskaya, and her God-given talents alone.

Sometimes words fail do fail even this writer, no matter how verbose I might be. Words cannot compare to the majesty and raw beauty of Plisetskaya’s finest performance. See below, and be mesmerized.

Cinematically Inclined: “Dogtooth”

If you ever think your family is weird, go see Dogtooth.

Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos has made a completely bonkers, totally mad social satire that can be compared to a baseball bat, but one that actually has a spike embedded on one side, ready to split your head in two. It’s a work of breathtaking subversion that would be outright obscene if it didn’t have a point to make.

In an unnamed Greek city, a father has kept his family unit so tight that he has complete control over their lives. His three adult children, a son and two daughters, have never left the large, minimalist, walled country estate in which they were presumably born, since they have no knowledge of the outside world. Think of it as Gormenghast in miniature. Through their parents, they learn that the world’s most dangerous animal is a cat, that they have a brother living on the other side of the wall that they have never seen or heard from, and that the world outside is so filled with peril that traveling via vehicle is the only way to stay safe. Whenever a plane flies overhead, they think it’s a toy that, when it tumbles down, is up for grabs. They are taught that the word “sea” refers to what we call an armchair and that the word “zombie” refers to a bright yellow flower. (You don’t even want to know what the word “keyboard” denotes, but when you do find out, it’s hysterical.) 

The house seems to be stuck in a time-warp circa 1982. It has a TV but no cable, and despite the fact that the film takes place in the present day, the most modern contrivance in the house is the VHS player. The only phone (rotary, of course) is kept in a vault in the master suite, only used when the mother calls out and the children think she’s talking to herself. Occasionally, father plays their “grandfather’s” music, which is actually Frank Sinatra, with the father translating “Fly Me to the Moon” in family-friendly lyrics that would constitute propaganda had this been an ideological state.

Occasionally meandering into this little slice of suburban hell is a guard at the father’s office named Christina, who he brings blindfolded to the compound to have sex with his son. What he doesn’t know is that she starts to trade sexual favours with at least one of the daughters, too. The children occupy their time exercising daily in the pool, reading medical textbooks, and discovering what all those parts of the human body are supposed to do. Any upset to the balance created by the father is met with swift, shockingly violent retaliation. One of the first examples of base, primal anger erupts in an argument that hints at darker pathology underneath, and the violence these people inflict on themselves and not only others is shocking and an excuse to call child welfare services (if you hadn’t done so already). If the apple didn’t fall far from the tree, then it only follows that any sociopathic tendencies may have been nurtured by or lorded over the clan by the father himself.

Did I mention that this film is also a comedy?

Notice that I have not called any family member by name. That’s because no one is called by name in the whole film, except for Christina. It’s oddly dehumanizing and yet completely appropriate that we not identify anyone with proper markers, and only in relationship to one another. It would have been too obvious to choose Biblical names, and not in keeping with the film’s sociopolitical undercurrent to make this a Garden of Eden retread.

Road Show: Portishead on Tour

[Ed. N.: This post originally ran on July 13, 2011, and is re-published to coincide with the band's current fall 2011 tour. This post also includes new tour dates, appended below.]


Sometimes, nothing hurls you gob-smack into the middle of your youth like hearing from an old favourite band. In the spring of 2008, the Blogger gleefully heard that the long-dormant, presumed-defunct mid-90s British trip-hop combo Portishead were releasing their first album of new material in over a decade. Suddenly, the writer shed all layers and armour of his presumed adulthood and opened the closet door (pun intended) to an awkward adolescence defined by sexual anguish, bad complexion and an unfortunate amount of flannel.

Portishead’s landmark disc, 1994’s Dummy, swept onto our shores with the emo movement, well before emo was even a catchphrase. Its numbing, sonic landscapes provided a lushly enveloping cocoon as turbulent as our feelings. Lead singer Beth Gibbons’s faraway vocals may have sounded disconnected at times but would descend into whispered anguish so potent it hardly dared to unleash its full force for fear that it might smash your stereo to smithereens. The chilling, spooky lead track “Sour Times (Nobody Loves Me)” brilliantly married a seemingly runaway snippet of old Hitchcock score with a fractured, hurried beat that somehow made for a brilliantly gruesome aural death match. The song laid siege to my Discman (remember those?) for several months in the spring of 1995, winning the prestigious Mercury Music Prize along the way.

“Sour Times” was accompanied by a haunting video with a now-cult-iconic image of Gibbons being interrogated in the bowels of MI-5’s office. Its juxtaposition of musical elements and the accompanying clip almost dared the listener to tell us just how awful we felt about ourselves at the time. How we felt at the time was a closely guarded secret, as personal and potent to us as the whereabouts of certain political renegades are to heads of state. Such experimental fare had maximal impact on MTV and radio at the time, but would have no room for the crass “reality” swindle and shallow, cookie-cutter contemporary radio that currently pollutes popular art and the public consciousness.

A decade passed after Portishead released their acclaimed second disc in 1997, and promptly vanished. In particular, they developed on their self-titled second disc the drama and orchestral sweep which would later inform Third. In particular, the magnificent, gut-wrenching “All Mine” that is nothing less than a shriek of passion from the depths of romantic misery and possession.

Take a listen and maybe you’ll see understand how it wouldn’t be out of place in a modern updating of Wuthering Heights.

They left behind a musical legacy evident in works by trip-hop artists like Massive Attack, who continue its evolution of sound long after the public was distracted by more disposable fare. Proof of Dummy’s lasting popular impact was immediate when, within nanoseconds of posting the news of the tour's announcement on Facebook, three of the writer’s friends wrote to proclaim their love for this remarkable band. Such swift declarations of love from a decidedly uncommercial, almost obscure British band speaks volumes on Dummy’s remarkable, lasting visceral power. Gibbons and company had cut through to the emotional core of its audience when first released and unwittingly held onto it. If the album were not as effective, then it would not have brought about such spontaneous adoration.

VIFF 2011: The Wrap-Up

So, who else is exhausted?

The Vancouver International Film Festival was amazing this year. I have never taken in so many films in such a short amount of time.

What I enjoyed most were not just the films, but also the enthusiasm and endless patience from VIFF staff and volunteers, the courtesy extended by viewers to each other in line and in the theatres, and the long line-ups around the block to see more experimental film. We may not always get first dibs on major works – we are not Cannes or Toronto or Venice, after all – but the fact that in sheer numbers we are one of the five biggest film fests in North America, with the turnout to back it up, is in and of itself encouraging.

For a list of all my festival-related posts, click here. You will find the festival survival guide at this link, including previews at the following links: Preview 1, Preview 2, Preview 3 and Preview 4. If you came to VIFF, I hope you ate well.

Here are the films I caught during VIFF 2011:

• The British Guide to Showing Off 
• Carol Channing: LargerThan Life
• Circumstance 
• Elena
• First Position
• The Front Line
• How to Die in Oregon
• The Kid with a Bike
• My Little Princess
• The Prize
• The Singing City
• Sleeping Beauty
• Sushi: the Global Catch
• Take This Waltz

Thank you to the great people at the media office, the volunteers and the rest of the VIFF staff for showing everyone a great time. Let’s do it all again next year?

VIFF 2011: “Der Preis (The Prize)”

They say you can’t go home again. German writer-director Elke Hauck explores this concept in her film Der Preis (The Prize), about a young German architect who returns to his old neighbourhood in East Berlin. Having won a prestigious design award, Alexander is commissioned to revitalize a Soviet-era apartment complex and oversee the project while it undergoes construction. The architect encounters old friends and acquaintances in the area, not quite comprehending that despite the disappearance of the Berlin Wall over twenty years ago, that this remnant of a bygone era has not only been forgotten in the future of Germany, but its inhabitants share that same malaise, too. It’s strange to think that the old spirit of Communism, now stagnant, has been sucked out of the area and replaced with … nothing much else.

Alex, in particular, has mixed feelings about the era. The film flashes back and forth, without explicitly stating it, to the architect as a young man growing up in the last years of the Iron Curtain. While he quickly climbed through the ranks of the Germany Free Youth, the Stalinist “friendship” group for East German teenagers, his best friend Michael was a punk who quickly fell out with Alex for being a conformist. Challenging authority and consuming more Western culture, Michael becomes increasingly more of a “threat” to the youth of their day. Then tragedy struck in their youth, in that same old apartment complex he has been assigned now, two decades later, to revitalize. Alex feels somehow responsible for what happened in the past and wonders if he could retreat in his mind in order to move forward, because he has never quite let go of the past.

Hauck’s film is framed and composed in the same locked-down spirit of the era. It asks of the country and in particular of Berlin: where have we come from? Where are we now? Where are we going, and with who? Is there a place in the vision of our country’s future for us? Is gentrification the way, or is it the natural enemy of organic growth and development? The film has a stripped-down look with no music score, and it is much stronger in the scenes taking place in 1980s East Germany, with a great sense of time and place. The realist touch removes the comic grandeur of the acclaimed East Berlin-era Goodbye, Lenin! and is as cold as Potsdammerplatz in January. That the production design looks as undistinguished in the present day as it was back in the Soviet era speaks volumes about stagnation and lack of progress. The film’s ultimate resolution is a bold declaration of how this particular section of Berlin responds to change. But will it ever?

The Prize also asks the question of survivalist instincts in a repressive regime. Do those who quietly conform really live, if they survive? And what of those who did not conform, and had a difficult time: did they have a better future when the Wall fell? These are certainly weighty questions to ask, and The Prize offers no easy answers. It will speak most profoundly to those who grew up or spent time behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War, as they may see their own experiences reflected in Hauck’s representation (like, say, the wayward agnostic looking back at his time in Catholic school). It’s worth mentioning that in German, the phrase “der preis” can translate to either “prize” or “price”. I will leave it to you to weigh and consider this in light of the film upon viewing.

Elke Hauck’s Der Preis (The Prize) played at the Vancouver International Film Festival and has been present at several film festivals this year, including the Berlinale. 

VIFF 2011: “My Little Princess”

Have you ever come across a picture of a teenage celebrity, take one look at the fifteen-year-old girl in full makeup, cleavage-exposing bustier, short-shorts and a sour look on her face, and been completely disgusted? (That, or watched those vulgar toddler beauty pageants: same difference.) There’s an unfortunate discussion of the “pimp parent” and the sexualization of minors in mainstream media. Controversial French-Romanian photographer Irina Ionesco would have scoffed at today’s ruckus, particularly since she did it first in the early 1970s.

Those with long memories will remember Ionesco. A Bohemian, French-Romanian photographer in Paris, she dressed her extremely young daughter Eva in baby doll nighties and full makeup, directed her to pose in vaguely sexual tableau, and sold them as art. This created a firestorm of controversy in the 1970s and pushed the boundaries of experimental art and bad taste. Eva, long out of that line work and still estranged from her mother to this very day, has fashioned her life story into the thinly veiled biopic My Little Princess.

Standing in for Irina is mercurial French actress Isabelle Huppert as Hanna Georgiu. She is given to wearing long flowing gowns, even in broad daylight, vanishes for long periods at a time, hangs around with artists and is the kind of self-involved Bohemian who douses herself in perfume to avoid the necessity of bathing. Having returned from yet another mysteriously long absence, Hanna reconnects with daughter Violetta and has her pose in erotic Lolita-style photography, passing them off as art and fetching thousands of dollars for them. Her excuse for not backing down is that she refuses to be “mediocre”, which if you think about it is really a Bourgeois cop-out she will not confess to (she’d sniff with a snooty yet juvenile “you just don’t get it”). Not quite understanding what is going on, Violetta soon becomes increasingly sexualized in her dress, showing up to school in satin short-shorts and halter tops. Did I mention that Violetta is ten years old? A natural model on camera, it’s disturbing to see her pose so effortlessly. Eventually, Violetta grows to adore and resent the attention her mother’s work brings her, loving the way the camera gazes at her yet loathing the heckling at her elementary school.

Ionesco keeps the film in check so that it doesn’t become uncomfortable or tacky. Thankfully, we do not see full-on underage nudity, despite the film’s subject matter. She has chosen the actors for what is essentially a Mommie Dearest dynamic very well. Newcomer Anamarie Vartolomei as Violetta, shining impressively with a feral energy that matches Huppert’s regal, self-deluded Hanna. By focusing on the relationship, Ionesco conveys the fact that the mother is not the only monster on screen. It’s shocking to see the daughter grow a false sense of entitlement and thereby become a beast of nature, particularly since she isn’t even a teenager yet, and one wonders just how badly the mother screwed her up. Huppert in particular has the harder job, delicately balancing Hanna’s love for Violetta with her own insatiable need for celebrity, given that she’s failed as an artist on so many other levels. My Little Princess fits well into the subgenre of the stage parent melodrama. (At this point you can lump the label “pimp parent” into that category, too.) By humanizing the parent and making the daughter hell on wheels, Ionesco shows how both parties are complicit, even if neither truly understands the nature of what they have wrought.

My Little Princess played to packed theatres at the Vancouver International Film Festival. As no North American release date has yet been announced, it may be a foregone conclusion that we may once again miss out on one of Huppert’s challenging, amazing performances. For more information on the film, click here.

VIFF 2011: “Elena”

Elena is a former nurse and live-in caregiver now married to Vladimir, a former elderly patient. They live in a luxurious modern flat in an unnamed Russian city. Vladimir’s daughter is the spoiled Katya, who lives a hedonistic lifestyle he supports, and shows up occasionally to simultaneously berate and coddle her father. Elena’s unemployed good-for-nothing son Sergei lives in a dank Soviet-era apartment he shares with his wife Tanya, teenage son Sasha and an infant boy, where the electricity cuts out and graffiti adorns the nondescript entrance facing an abandoned wood where gang fights happen regularly.

Elena discovers that Sasha gets involved in those increasingly dangerous gang wars and wants to send him to a good university, lest he be drafted by the army or end up rotting in prison for petty crime. She pleads with Vladimir for the money, but because Sergei and his family are Elena’s children from a previous marriage, he will not help them. One day, chance intervenes and there is an opportunity for Elena to get the money to help her son’s family, after all. The means by which she can do so, however, are rather unsettling and constitute a moral dilemma that vaguely recalls those other purveyors of Russian misery and ethical debate, Tolstoy and Dovstoevsky. The results are chilling.

Andrei Zvyagintsev’s remarkable film Elena played out of competition at Cannes this year, where it received the Special Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard section for non-competing films. Regarded as an important landmark in Russian film, it’s easy to see why. Elena is a modern parable and an analysis on how Russian society has been evolving and may evolve in the future. In this film, we see four generations of the same country represented: the old guard who have siphoned off most of the wealth and hoarded it for themselves once the Iron Curtain fell; the aging baby boomers who constitute the professional working class; the Gen X-ers who came of age in the dawn of Russian capitalism and who are now slave to rampant sloth and alcoholism; and the post-Soviet youth who couldn’t have ever fathomed standing in bread lines. Taken as sociopolitical allegory, the film traces the flow and redistribution of wealth in contemporary Russia, and who will inherit and become the nation as the class divide ever widens between the mega-wealthy and the destitute who survive on the average income of $600 a month. It’s not difficult to see, in the end, how the new generation of “spoiled bratskis” came about, the ones whose obscene displays of nouveau riche through wild spending and frequent trips to GUM and TSUM obscure the country’s true state from international headlines.

That Elena takes place in a completely nondescript city with no identifying markers just might make this contemporary Russia’s answer to American Beauty: it speaks to larger social problems that decay the system. And yet Zvyagintsev bookends the film with contrasting images showing that life will somehow go on, even if it continues through misbegotten means and questionable choices. Anchoring the film is veteran Russian actress Nadezhda Markina, in a remarkable performance where she doesn’t say much, but communicates so much with body language and subtle movements, like a great silent film actress. There’s also an elegant score by Phillip Glass, one that flows throughout and lends the film an appropriately chilly demeanour.

Elena played to capacity crowds at the Vancouver International Film Festival. The reviews have been dazzling, and it has already caused a sensation in Russia not just for its content, but also for its omission as the Federation’s official entry for the Best Foreign Film Oscar. Given Elena’s rapturous reception at film festivals the world over, this is indeed a shame.

VIFF 2011: “The Kid with a Bike”

The Dardennes brothers were never one for elaborate filmmaking. These Belgian directors make quietly shattering films on life amongst marginal groups in their hometown, showing how circumstance and terrible judgment can lead to horrible consequences. Past two-time winners of the Palme d’Or at Cannes, their latest feature The Kid with a Bike won the Grand Jury Prize this year (second behind only The Tree of Life) and is screened this week at the Vancouver International Film Festival.

Cyril Catouil (Thomas Doret) is an eleven-year-old boy who loves to ride bikes. His ne’er-do-well father has gone missing. A local hairdresser, Samantha (Hereafter’s Cécile de France), takes him in on weekends, in order to give him structure and keep him out of trouble. She first meets him as he takes shelter from social workers in a medical office, telling him as he clings to her, “not so tight. You can hold onto me but not so tight.” This becomes a metaphor for their often difficult relationship. Over the course of the film, she takes him to see his father, who no longer wants anything to do with the boy, and is often tested by Cyril’s tempestuous nature and penchant for running away, only to return after enduring further humiliations on the playground. Partway through the film, seeking a paternal figure and rebelling against the otherwise convivial and patient Samantha, Cyril is taken under the wing of a local thug and is tempted by a life of petty crime.

Although most coming-of-age films revolve around sexual awakening, The Kid with a Bike focuses instead on early exposure to ethical and moral dilemmas that are often only faced in young adulthood. It’s not often that you get to see youth this young grapple with career defining, life-altering decisions, but Cyril confronts them head-on. It’s not uncommon for the Dardennes to examine this topic, given that their earlier works such as Rosetta, Le Fils and L’Enfant explore the difficulties of life in lower middle-class Belgium. The film has shades of Vittorio de Sica’s classic The Bicycle Thief, down to its very title, as they explore how human nature is governed and tampered by survival instincts. Anyone having worked with disadvantaged or troubled youth will recognize and acknowledge Cyril’s raw anger and sense of abandonment, manifesting itself in criminal tendencies. Social workers and caregivers will also understand Samantha’s frustration in attempting to provide Cyril with a normal life, and his resistance to it. The Dardennes don’t judge Cyril’s actions, they only observe them, and allow the consequences to flow from them without heavy-handed melodramatics, allowing him to experience them and understand them himself.

There are moments when the film is unexpectedly shocking. I am thinking of a conversation between two characters in the film whose dialogue is morally perverse, couched in situational ethics and moral relativism. That nothing has presaged this exchange – the Dardennes shun the use of symbolic imagery or foreboding music to foreshadow what’s coming – makes it even more shocking. (You’ll know what I mean when you see it.) The directors use their trademark lean, sparse presentation style so that what occurs is so matter-of-fact that it’s naturalistic, and will unexpectedly follow you out of the cinema. It makes a seemingly straightforward coming-of-age tale into a dark morality play, albeit a slightly more optimistic one than the Dardennes’ previous work. You won’t forget about this kid or his bike anytime soon.

The Kid with a Bike is one of the best-reviewed and most accomplished films of the year. It will play back-to-back screenings on Friday, October 14, as the closing entry of the Vancouver International Film Festival. The film is in French with English subtitles. For more information, click here. 

VIFF 2011: “The Singing City”

Those of you who have been following my blog know that I have a major preoccupation with German opera. In particular, the long and difficult works of Wagner have been known to keep me rapt for the many, many hours that they last. So it was with much anticipation that I saw The Singing City (Die Singende Stadt), a documentary on the Stuttgart Opera’s 2010 production of Wagner’s opus Parsifal.

This mighty opera is not for the faint of heart or the impatient. A long meditation on King Arthur and the search for the Holy Grail, the opera features a cast of hundreds at any given performance and requires considerable endurance from the performers, the orchestra and the audience. In 2010, Vadim Jendreyko was given unprecedented access to the Stuttgart Opera’s unusual post-Apocalyptic mounting of Parsifal, complete with gas masks, scuba gear, nudity and shrunken baby-doll heads worn as headdresses. Jendreyko followed the company for the entire length of the pre-production, covering every aspect of the play. We see how props and sets are built from scratch, and cleaned up after dress rehearsal.

Shot using HD cameras and featuring a magnificent sound recording, the film allows us unprecedented access to the production. We observe the Spanish-speaking costume designer, who doesn’t speak German, as she attempts to balance the director’s design instructions with the logistical impossibilities of singing opera in her designs. We delight in the American tenor attempting to master his pronunciation of the word “unrevealed” in German, to the unending patience and amusement from his dialect coach. The director clashes with the cast, the make-up artists meticulously weave wigs on prop corpses that the audience will barely see, the lighting designer works complicated spreadsheets to ensure that he computes and calibrates the lights just the way the director wants, and the orchestra has to contend with the prop blood spilling out from the urine bags tied to corpses onstage into the orchestra pit. The Opera has an international cast, and at any given time you can hear English, German and Spanish being spoken in the course of rehearsals.

What The Singing City conveys most vividly is the meticulous manpower and efforts of literally a thousand people attempting to bring the director’s avant-garde interpretation of one of the most controversial, complicated operas in history to life for a discerning, cultured audience. Jendreyko forgoes the standard narration and title cards that accompany most behind-the-scenes documentaries and instead plants his cameras at rehearsals, workshops and meetings to give us the sense that we are there. The effect is that rather than having a narrative guide to the proceedings, we view the work as it organically takes shape, lending the documentary a greater immediacy than most other non-fiction features. What’s most exciting is that the film shows us the dignity and joy in work, and in creating art. Every member of the production, from the child chorus to the make-up artist to the sound engineer, is given an opportunity to be seen and heard in the film. Although The Singing City might be a misleading title, it makes sense in the context that everything in the Stuttgart Opera’s building operates within the context of its own rules and governance, much like a city itself. My only quibble is that we do not get to see a snippet of the finished work, but one can easily find these clips on YouTube (the clip is slightly NSFW, but the nudity is used tastefully and not for exploitation or titillation purposes).

The Singing City is playing at the Vancouver International Film Festival, with one final performance on Thursday, October 13. For ticket information, click here, and you can view the trailer here. If you’re interested in more information on the Stuttgart Opera, click here. The film is presented in German, Spanish and in English, with English subtitles, and runs a lightning-fast 92 minutes.

VIFF 2011: "First Position"

Director and journalist Bess Kargman was looking for inspiration for her first documentary feature. One day, while walking in Manhattan, she happened upon a dance recital. Being a former dancer herself, she went into the concert hall and was captivated by an enchanting half-Japanese, half-American dancer named Miko, who was not even ten years old, and decided to make a film about the young ballet talent competition, the Young America Grand Prix. This was the inspiration for her directorial debut, First Position, as she told us at a screening of the film at the Vancouver International Film Festival.

First Position follows a year in the lives of a half-dozen young dancers aged 11 to 17 as they prepared to participate in the Grand Prix. This contest, like American Idol does for singers, can make careers. Prizes include not only performance medals, but highly sought-after dance contracts and major scholarships from the likes of the Royal Ballet Theatre, American Ballet Theater, Royal Winnipeg Ballet and virtually all of the world’s most esteemed dance companies. Kargman was given all-access to these dancers and the competition.

We meet 11-year-old Aran, a charming young dance prodigy living on a US army base in Naples and training in Rome. His fellow competitor Gaya is a young Israeli girl whose mother is a little too intent on making them into a ballet supercouple (they are only 11 years old). Fourteen-year-old Michaela was born at the height of the Sierra Leone civil unrest, adopted by a New England Jewish couple, and now fights various bodily injuries as she takes her shot at a dance scholarship, hoping to one day open a dance academy in her war-torn home country. Sixteen-year-old Colombian Joan Sebastien is sponsored by a former ABT dancer, and carries the hopes and dreams of his family in New York City. Privileged Rebecca is the all-American girl who may have the word “princess” in stencils on her bedroom wall, but who is a studious, disciplined dancer, entering the job market at a time when companies are no longer hiring new talent. And then there’s Miko, the Palo Alto tween who has a glowing, natural stage presence and clearly lives to dance, whose mother has also pushed her adorably clumsy younger brother Jules (J.J.) into the field, hoping to raise two dance stars in her family.

Kargman’s compassionate feature marks the confident debut of a new talent. Having trained as a journalist and a dancer, she explained in the post-screening Q&A to a receptive, appreciative audience that her professional training and understanding of the inner workings of the ballet world gave her the tools to truly explore these aspiring dancers’ lives and interpret the challenges they face to her audience. Write about what you know, they say, and the same is true of directing as it is in any art form. We gain insight from intimate moments, such as Michaela’s mother dying the flesh tones in her daughter’s ballet costumes for aesthetic purposes. Why? Because ballet outfits aren’t available in African-American flesh tones. We follow Joan Sebastian to his home in Cali, Colombia, a world away from Manhattan, and realize that without his mentor’s assistance, they would never have afforded the tuition when the average salary is $250 a month in Colombia. Dance was his way out and into the world. And we see how Miko’s and J.J.’s father moved his entire company’s office closer to the best dance studio in order to give his children’s burgeoning careers flight. These little sacrifices, combined with the hours of punishing practice and debilitating injuries, show how resilient and tough the dancers are.

You will not find stories of anorexia or the artfully perverse fantasia of Black Swan here. Even the so-called stage parents and sadistic coaches are empathetic, not monsters. They simply recognize that their young charges will falter, but also can and will continue to do better. These youth live to dance simply because they are happy doing it, and can better express themselves in their physicality than they ever could in words. And that is the mark of a real visual and performance artist. Kargman has already indicated she will be doing a follow-up film in ten years’ time, to chart the development of these youth into hopefully accomplished dancers.

First Position played to rapt audiences at the Vancouver International Film Festival. You can still catch one last screening on Friday, October 14 by buying tickets here. If you miss it, don’t fret, because Kargman announced that the film was very recently granted a distribution deal in North America and will be coming soon to a theatre near you. For more information, check out the film’s active Facebook page and website.

VIFF 2011: “Sleeping Beauty”

Sometimes, a work of art is too beautiful to behold but seems a little remote, just out of reach, and not quite accessible. Julia Leigh’s stunning Sleeping Beauty falls into that category of cinematic art.

Lucy (Emily Browning) is a young college student who seems addicted to work of all kinds. She is a high-class prostitute at night and supplements her tuition by also working shifts at a restaurant and doing administrative work in a corporate office. Her most regular client is Birdman, a lonely man who doesn’t ask her to perform anything sexual on him, and prefers her company while he eats his cereal with vodka.

Lucy answers an ad for a night job as a server in an erotic-themed catering company on a freelance basis, with the potential to obtain greater work. The enterprise is owned by a plumy-voiced, exquisite madam named Claire (Rachael Blake), whose soothing demeanour masks the more demeaning aspects of the job. If Charlotte Rampling ever decided to retire from acting, Blake is a surefire replacement, as she has that authoritative, sexy but dangerous voice down pat. Soon enough, Lucy becomes Claire’s “sleeping beauty”, by essentially being knocked unconscious with a sedative in a chamber while rich old male clients have their way with her, but without actual penetration. At some point, Lucy realizes that she needs to know what’s been going on while she’s been unconscious and submissive.

Leigh’s film is undoubtedly inspired by the dehumanizing, cruel edge Michael Haneke brings to the cinema. This is a cold film where we follow the lead character relentlessly but know little of her inner life. What must she be thinking, feeling, saying? She has classmates and roommates, but we don’t get the sense that she has any actual close friends. Browning has a stunning pre-Raphaelite beauty that glows incandescently, and perhaps some of the most perfect alabaster skin ever seen in a film. And yet despite the client’s ability to own her body, she remains as remote and mysterious as a figurine. She is presented in a delicately art-directed chamber that recalls a museum piece on display, but never connects with her clients in any way whatsoever. Perhaps this is Leigh’s point: that owning fantasy is never the same thing as connecting with it.

Ultimately, Leigh has crafted a handsome art piece that, because it rejects conventional narrative form for imagery, might be too difficult for some. As an exercise in cinema, it is exquisitely fashioned, with several unforgettable images that will burn into the psyche. The mise-en-scène is comprised of somnambulist erotic tableaux, and it’s clear that Leigh has a gift for imagery. Browning delivers one of the most daring performances in cinema this year, taking massive artistic risks and laying her body bare (if not quite her soul) showing that she is a serious, challenging type. (Trivia note: the role originally belonged to acclaimed actress Mia Wasikowska.) That being said, the film has a hard edge comparable to beautiful but poisonous flora. There was a lot of uncomfortable laughter at the sold-out screening I attended, myself included. Already notorious for appearing on the Black List of unproduced Hollywood screenplays, this difficult piece requires full attention, and perhaps another viewing, in order to fully digest and decipher its meaning. Leigh’s dialogue is sparse, and she demands that her viewer see beyond the words and images to gather her overall meaning. Although this will no doubt confuse the masses and frustrate mainstream critics, I can already sense that Sleeping Beauty is really a master’s thesis which must be examined in closer detail.

Sleeping Beauty plays at the Vancouver International Film Festival on Sunday, October 9, at 4:00 pm, at Empire Granville Cinema.

VIFF 2011: “Take This Waltz”

“But I set fire to the rain

Watched it pour as I touched your face
Well, it burned while I cried
'Cause I heard it screaming out your name, your name” – Adele

Sarah Polley’s first film since her stunning, Oscar-nominated Away From Her is a study in marital dissatisfaction and the thrill of something new. Margot (Michelle Williams) is a slightly off-kilter, anti-social hipster who has been married for five years to Lou (Seth Rogen), a chef working on a book of nothing but chicken recipes. On a business trip, she becomes irresistibly drawn to Daniel (Luke Kirby), an artist who works as a rickshaw driver and who just happens to live across the street from them. During the course of several chance encounters, he discovers that she’s unhappy in her marriage, not because of any fault of her husband’s, but because of her own malaise and dissatisfaction. Over time, Margot spends more time with Daniel and they make a date to meet thirty years into the future, because she can’t act on her impulses and her new feelings now … or could she?

This is not a film where true love must conquer all. To leave a dissatisfying situation is the solution that works for everyone. Circumstance can sometime dictate our decisions, and in take this waltz, Polley stealthily introduces that the problem is not merely one of attraction of romantic predicament, but of something deeper and more organic to character. Inspired in no small part by David Lean’s Brief Encounter, if not overtly then in spirit and candour, Take This Waltz is the rare romantic work where no one is particularly villainous or angelic, they are simply who they are and are not purely defined by their actions. Margot is a flake. Lou adores her, even if he is a bit juvenile and plays little jokes on her that never quite completely rob her of her dignity. Daniel is earthy, artistic and bold. Margot’s dilemma is not encapsulated within a conventional plot. It is, much like Blue Valentine (also starring Williams), an intimate character study of the aftermath of great passion and its remains. Ultimately, Polley reveals that happily ever after is not defined by circumstance, but by difficult choices that affect all involved parties. The final scenes is particularly telling and, without ever saying a single word, speaks to a more solemn undertone that has been there all along, but you just never saw until the credits roll.

The film boasts a dream cast that flourishes under Polley’s confident direction. Williams has become one of our most reliable dramatic actresses, following up her Oscar-nominated turn in Blue Valentine with another rich performance. Kirby exudes just enough attraction to make him irresistible, without making him a total creep (even if he is kind of a jerk for not leaving her well alone). There is a great surprise in Sarah Silverman’s brief but effective turn as Lou’s alcoholic sister, who sees everyone more clearly than they could ever see themselves. But the true revelation in Take This Waltz is Vancouver native Rogen as Lou, a great bear of a man who is slightly childish, but whose happy exterior contains a limitless reservoir of feeling. In a scene of slowly cascading heartbreak, he pours out his emotions not in long speeches, but in fits and spurts of quiet desperation. Rogen has heretofore only appeared in puerile comedies, and on the basis of his magnificent performance here should be freed from ever making anything remotely resembling Knocked Up.

Take This Waltz played to packed houses at the Vancouver International Film Festival after a rapturous reception at Toronto. Check the website for more information, including a possible but yet unannounced commercial release date.

VIFF 2011: “Circumstance”

Atafeh (Nikhol Boosheri) and Shireen (Sarah Kazemy) are teenagers living in Tehran. Shireen lives with her uncle and it is strongly implied that her parents left Iran due to their “subversive” ideas. Atafeh is from a well-to-die Ismaili family, to accomplished professional parents. For fun, her father tests her knowledge of classical recordings (Pablo Casals is a particular favourite, it seems). Her older brother Mehran (Reza Sixo Safai) is a former junkie, fresh from detox, who has discovered Allah. Atafeh and Shireen fall in love and dream of escaping their circumstances, fancying not only each other but a life together in Dubai. Meanwhile, Mehran’s rehabilitation has given way to an increasingly fundamental point of view, one worlds away from his old party days. Coupled with his growing erotic obsession with Shireen, he becomes more dangerous as he grows increasingly sure of himself in his new identity, and suspects that the girls are up to something in private. The girls also have regular clubbing friends, including two closeted gay men, one of whom is intent on dubbing Milk into Persian for distribution on the black market.

 This is a film on contemporary Iran and the dichotomy between the outward display of conservative values in public, contrasted with the exciting underground nightlife that can only be accessed with passwords and subtle nods of the head for the initiated. This underworld is dancing on a knife’s edge, as the morality police could swoop in at any moment, ready to make arrests and shut the joint down.

Despite the temptation to make the film into a heavy-handed lecture on the lack of LGBT (and for that matter women’s) rights in parts of the Middle East, director Maryam Keshavarz brings a light touch to the work, almost as if she were caressing the most erotic part of the human body, wherever it might be (on you). To heighten the forbidden love and just how dangerous the lovers’ predicament is, the camera switches stocks every so often, shifting the focus to an unknown CCTV feed, demonstrating that they could be caught and punished anywhere, anytime, for lesser offences such as playing western music too loudly in their car or letting too thick a lock of hair peek out from underneath their veils. Imagine the consequences if the true nature of their love were exposed. Keshavarz understands that sometimes, all you need is a look in your eye, or the unspoken presence of a key character in a scene, that gives you all need to know. This is a film so intimate that it’s almost as if we were eavesdropping on inner monologue. That this is Keshavarz’s directorial debut, one filmed in secret in Beirut and with a powder keg of a subject matter, makes this an even more remarkable accomplishment.

Director Keshavarz with the cast, receiving the Sundance
Audience Award in January 2011

Circumstance received the Audience Award at Sundance and is easily one of the best films of the year. The film was presented at VIFF with co-sponsor Vancouver Queer Film Festival. The weekend screening was sold out, which portends a potentially successful commercial release, with star (and recent Best Actress winner at the LA LGBT Film Festival) Boosheri present to introduce her breakthrough performance. For more information, check out the film’s website and this thoughtful New York Times article.