Between Two Worlds

Between Two Worlds (Ahasin Wetei) addresses years of civil war and instability in Sri Lanka not with drama, not with documentary reportage, but with an admirably uncompromising and beautiful surrealism. Directed by Vimukthi Jayasundara and shot by Channa Deshapriya (who won a cinematography award at the 2009 Dubai Film Festival), Between Two Worlds is a stunning series of widescreen dreams depicting a land and a people reacting to violence and disorder organically, whimsically, and sometimes superconsciously, but always without ordinary sense and logic.

It had been a good while since I’d seen a purely surreal film, and Between Two Worlds was a primal pleasure. There is, naturally, not much plot to report. The film opens with an arresting sequence in which a young man (Thusitha Laknath) jumps from a low cliff into the sea, and is then washed up on a beach. Though on the surface it appears to be a suicide attempt, we’re not sure whether it could be a ritual, or a symbol, or a dream, or all of the above. The Indian Ocean and Sri Lankan coastline rendered with gorgeous colors and textures in widescreen, the hypnotic sound of the surf, and the half-conscious movements of the young man combine to create quite a spell.

But that spell is broken and a new one cast when the scene suddenly switches to an urban center in the grip of violence and anarchy. We follow the same young man as he inexplicably takes part in a bizarre civil uprising, apparently aimed at the apparatus of communication: thousands of people wearing Mickey Mouse masks attack journalists, blow up radio towers and stations, and smash televisions in the street.

Shortly after he rescues a young woman from being raped (only to cling to her in a rather aggressive and confused way himself), he flees the city again, and spends the rest of the film wandering about the countryside, seemingly in a trance, taking part in strangely disjointed events and interacting with strange people. He is apparently on the run from an unnamed military, which sometimes has anachronistic aspects, as in the astonishing scene in which a group of rebels are attacked by men on horseback. There is some indication our hero is a prophet or some other mystical traveller, perhaps an incarnation of a mythical being, moving outside of time and history, and only witnessing fragments of mortal life and conflict. Many times he takes on the characteristics of an animal: stalking warily through a field of grass, crawling through a jungle, hiding in the trunk of a tree. Jayasundara shapes this unorthodox dreamtime using elemental motifs: trees, water, fish, blood, breast milk. The movie seems to flow according to a stream of consciousness, but it’s also very carefully composed and “painterly” (to use one irresistible buzzword).

As with the best surreal art, Between Two Worlds is inscrutable but edifying at the same time. It portrays war, oppression, and rebellion viscerally, and creates space for us to reflect on our society’s relationship to nature and the timelessness of our actions in this world. As mentioned, Deshapriya’s cinematography is rich and marvellous whether he’s working with huge landscapes or candlelight. It’s difficult to decide whether this film, or the Turkish director Semih Kaplanoğlu’s Honey, which was also at Sydney Film Festival, is more beautifully shot. Between these two and the ghostly, surreal Thai film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, SFF 2010 offered some visionary yet earthy, abstract yet powerful and affecting stuff from the Asian continent.

If Between Two Worlds has a weakness, it’s that a few of the weird tableaux, especially the larger-scale ones, falter in their execution: either becoming silly, or openly betraying flaws in the production design. In the Mickey Mouse riot at the film’s beginning, some of the characters have stilted, unnatural movements, and are obviously throwing fake kicks and punches. Is this intended to highlight the absurdity of violence? If so, it doesn’t really work. Later, in a scene where huge trees are moving in the backround during an unseen skirmish in the jungle, we can actually see the ropes used to manipulate the trees.

This occasional cognitive dissonance is a shame in light of the visionary moments that work so well, like the aforementioned scene with the cavalry, and that in which Laknath’s character takes part in a human chain moving buckets of water. It’s part dance and part mysterious ritual — the men’s choreographed movement and the sound of their chanting is beautiful and disturbing. It’s one of the unforgettable images I’ll retain from this beautiful and disturbing film.

Police, Adjective

The catchphrase “police procedural” describes fiction that focuses on the painstaking work detectives do to solve crimes. The description originally applied to stories depicting the gritty or even tedious side of a very difficult line of work — noir with an unromantic but compelling streak of realism. But recently police procedurals have taken on a lot of flash and glamour with the tremendous popularity of shows like CSI and Law and Order SVU. In an age of constant crime reportage, we’re inclined to make heroes of the fictional cops who fashion sense out of chaos. I think there’s something darker at work too: perhaps as we fetishize the processes and technology used to solve crimes, we fetishize the crimes themselves.

The new Romanian film Police, Adjective thumbs its nose at all of this, pointedly, if not gleefully, draining all the romance from the most played-out genre of our time. It takes the concept of “police procedural” to its logical conclusion, showing police work at its most mundane, bureaucratic, and demoralizing. But as crafted by writer-director Corneliu Porumboiu with deliberate pacing and a bone-dry Romanian wit, it’s nimble and clever and even entertaining, while making subtle commentary on life after Ceausescu’s police state.

Dragos Bucur plays Cristi, a young cop with a boring, thankless job. He’s tasked with tailing a group of teenagers to determine which one of them is supplying hash to the others. This mostly involves standing around for hours in the cold, waiting for the kids to come and go, watching them smoke in a schoolyard. The way it’s presented here there’s nothing voyeuristic or even very suspenseful about this stuff. We never even see a closeup of the suspects. It’s just one long, quietly atmospheric take after another of Cristi watching, chainsmoking, going to get tea to break the tedium. The city setting is drab, little else but brick and grey concrete; there never seems to be any sunlight. After his long days, Bucur retires to various shabby, flourescent offices to fill out endless paperwork. It’s a dull, sometimes dysfunctional environment left over from the repressive 1970s and 80s.

It’s not long before it’s clear Cristi doesn’t have much stomach for his duty: he complains about the prospect of locking up a kid over petty drug charges, and spends much of the film trying to prove to his superiors there’s no case so he doesn’t have to feel bad about ruining a young life. But the system gives him little choice but to continue gathering evidence to incriminate. And Cristi is no heroic lone wolf from some other cop movie; he’s a blue-collar worker in the service of functionaries. He’s not unintelligent, but perhaps a bit hapless, and has a tendency to get pushed around by his colleagues and lose arguments.

What the film lacks in warmth and excitement, it makes up in cheek. The plot of Police, Adjective is essentially just a framework for a series of acerbic dialogues, low-key but often hilarious banter about minor details. The Eastern European fondness for cynical barbs and aphorisms really gleams on display here. In this wordplay there is a particular focus on the meaning of the words themselves. Time and again, Cristi finds himself in discussions and disagreements about the exact definitions of words and concepts — whether it’s the legalisms that bind his actions or the banal lyrics to a song his wife likes.

As the film slouches toward its inevitably implosive conclusion, it’s obvious that Porumboiu as a writer is far more interested in semantics than politics or police work. The “climactic” scene, a confrontation between Cristi and his chief (Vlad Ivanov) is one long, slow-burning exercise in dialectics. There are no good guys or bad guys, no violence; this place is not even exciting enough to be Kafkaesque.

Police, Adjective is very watchable and enjoyable given how hard it works to portray tedium and bureaucracy. The cinematography is excellent — its cool, overcast tones and eye for detail fixing a melancholy sense of place in this urban backwater. Bucur portrays Cristi as a flawed but very likeable guy. He never smiles — no one does in this film — but not far beneath his mask of sarcasm and ennui he’s quite human, vaguely yearning for a slightly more free and just system (dimly represented by his honeymoon in Prague). There are several scenes in which we simply watch as he eats lunch, or sits at a desk and reads, and Bucur’s odd charisma makes it happen.

Porumboui’s directorial hand is very assured here; I imagine the occasionally uneven tone is intended. But I found the consistently sharp wordplay to be the strongest thing about the film, and could have done with far more of it in proportion to the long stretches without dialogue. Porumboui’s calculated deconstruction of the crime genre at times succeeds in deconstructing his own creation; occasionally there’s a dissatisfying sense that the whole thing’s a pisstake. But overall Police, Adjective is a uniquely dry and droll slice of boring life.

Honey

Honey (Bal), the third entry in Turkish director Semih Kaplanoğlu’s “Yusuf Trilogy” following Egg (Yumurta) and Milk (Süt), won the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival in January before playing here at the Sydney Film Festival. It deserves its Golden Bear and any other accolades it may receive. It’s the best film I’ve seen in a long time.

Well, since the last great Turkish film I saw anyway. In case you don’t know (I didn’t until recently), the Turkish independent film scene is experiencing some kind of remarkable epoch. A fountain of creativity has been harnessed to a pragmatic determination to produce and distribute (often with financial backing from Europe), and the result has been one highly original and personal film after another. The list of awards claimed by Turkish indies in recent years is long.

Let me give an idea of the exuberance of Turkish filmmaking at the moment. Derviş Zaim, one of the founders of the movement, is in the midst of a series of three thrillers, each one thematically inspired by a different medieval Islamic art technique. The most recent one, Dot (Nokta), was one of the best films of last year. Pelin Esmer made a documentary about her uncle, an obsessive collector of junk, then proceeded to reformat it into the brilliant narrative feature 10 to 11 (11′e 10 Kala) — keeping her uncle onboard to play himself. Call me late to the game, but I was so impressed with the consistent high quality of all the films in the Turkish program at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival last year. It reminds me of what one New York journalist wrote about the glory days of hiphop. A naïve friend asked him which hiphop records were good. His reply was, the black ones, and also the ones that are round — in other words, all of them. If someone asked me what Turkish indies to see, I’d say all of them.

In this atmosphere for Kaplanoğlu to plan a trilogy telling the life story of a young poet in reverse order, with breakfast as a running motif, doesn’t seem so farfetched — and in fact the three installments were completed and released in three successive years. I’ve not seen Egg or Milk, so I can’t comment on the part Honey plays in the “reverse trilogy.” I can only say how much I loved this film and describe its mesmerizing effect.

Honey concerns Yusuf (Bora Altaş) at the age of six, and his relationship with his loving father (Erdal Beşikçioğlu). The plot is mainly just a series of sketches. The boy learns to read. The boy harvests wild honey with his father. The boy has difficulty speaking, and struggles in school. The boy is jealous of his cousin. The boy learns to love poetry. The boy waits for his father to return from a journey. These strands are shaped slowly over the course of the film into a quiet suspense.

Honey depicts a child’s state of mind better than any film I’ve seen. We tend to recall childhood from an adult’s linear perspective. We remember the first time we were stung by a bee — boy did that hurt! Or the time we ate too much ice cream and threw up — that was funny! We’ve taken years of memories and sequenced highlights in convenient and banal ways as if they were TV news.

What we often forget, or won’t admit, is that children live in a different world than we do. It’s a world less complicated, more pure, filled with joy and even ecstasy. But it is also more mysterious and frightening, and to them it can seem dangerous and cruel. Children are not stupid or backwards, but their minds work differently. They perceive relationships between people differently. They perceive time differently. They might stare at a tree or an anthill for hours, or simply stare into space and think. They invent and devoutly follow their own primal belief systems and mythologies to help them understand what’s going on around them. An everyday object or an immediate family member can transform suddenly into a threat.

Once when I was about the same age as Yusuf, I was terrified by a dead wasp in our family’s car. It had died in an upright position so that it looked merely at rest on the panel below the rear window. It sat there, eerily still, not far from where I was sitting, looking enormous to me. I vividly recall its staring eyes. I alerted my parents — and they told me not to worry about it, it wouldn’t hurt me. But I simply couldn’t believe I was asked to endure such a thing. I momentarily lost all trust in my parents as well as my belief in biological death and other laws of nature. The world had ceased to make sense. I was trapped, imprisoned, locked in a seatbelt for a timeless time, with a possibly undead monster lurking close by.

Honey is largely made up of such impressions. Yusuf is the center of the story; he’s onscreen almost every moment. Since he doesn’t speak much, there’s not much dialogue, and much of that is whispered. The film is crafted according to his perspective: the point of view is quite often low to the ground; adults and furniture seem to tower overhead; the objects that so fascinate a child are given prominence (a wooden toy ship, a glass bowl full of ribbons). Mysterious interactions between other people are viewed at a melancholy distance (often through a window).

Time is highly manipulated: it collapses or is stretched depending on what’s on Yusuf’s mind. In one memorable sequence, he gets out of bed in the morning to see whether his father has arrived home; then we see virtually the same thing repeated, and we realize it’s now the next day. Yusuf is only living for that part of each day. In other instances we’re not sure of the order of events, or whether what we’re seeing is a dream. Yusuf’s dreaming life is key to his character — there is some suggestion he’s clairvoyant. In many ways Honey plays like a series of dreams; but it’s not surreal as such. In fact it’s beautifully earthy, with terrific detail of country life in the Black Sea region of Turkey. Bora Altaş’ touching performance is also very grounding. He carries the film with delicate charisma.

Kaplanoğlu’s mise-en-scene and Bariş Özbiçer’s cinematography are masterful. Working with a palette of deep forest greens and rich browns, using lots of shadow and natural sources of light, they’ve made nearly every frame of the film as glowing and sumptuous as a classic Dutch painting. But it’s not static; the tension between stillness and movement is enthralling. In one scene, Yusuf’s father cuts and eats an apple while a kettle behind him comes to a boil. At first our eyes are drawn to the knife and fruit in the room’s dim golden light; we only start to register the blue flame of the stove in the background as the sound of the whistling kettle very slowly rises up into the sound mix. There’s an abundance of such exquisite shots — the skittering of a bee across the pages of a book, the dancing of the moon reflected in a bucket of water. And the visual scheme may be pastoral but it’s not quaint or precious. There’s a freshness in the approach that makes ordinary things appear striking, as in the strange low-angle shot of Yusuf’s uncle making rope, highlighting the rhythm of his activity. One sequence depicting a festival on a plateau frames a large crowd with the detachment and thrilling, abstract beauty of the German photographer Andreas Gursky.

The great sound design is a big part of the total effect, especially in the scenes set in the woods. There is no music at all in the film, but an especially lush and detailed soundtrack of rustling leaves, running water, birds, and animals forms its own ambient music and goes a long way to suggesting Yusuf’s internal condition. This is one indie you’ll want to watch with a good sound system.

The trancelike state created by Honey recalls a very different film, No Country For Old Men. At the peak of their powers, the Coen brothers found a perfect pitch between the unusual stillness of many scenes and the suspense generated by the plot. We might be gazing at a desert landscape, looking for one distant movement in the corner of the frame; or staring at light reflected on a doorknob in the dark, waiting an agonizing time for something to happen. Honey works on such levels. So often indie cinema aims for minimalism: minimal budget, minimal drama or emotion, minimal apparatus. Honey may be quiet and slow, but like the intense ambient music of Brian Eno or Ulf Lohmann, its scope and impact are maximal.

I guess there’s always going to be disussion about whether films like this are “meditative” and “contemplative,” or simply “boring.” I saw a lot of sneering, contemptuous reviews of Honey; one Indiewire critic, frustrated by what he called a substandard Berlinale, dismissed it as “ponderous.” A controversial editorial in Sight & Sound (noted in this blog) skewered Honey as an example of “Slow Cinema,” citing an epidemic of boring, “passive-aggressive” films made by elitist auteurs, supported by a lazy industry.

I’ll never be accused of elitism; I’m more keen to see Iron Man 2 than half the indies released this year. I did not sense it here, unless an original vision presented with great skill is elitist. And I also had an opportunity to compare Honey with other “contemplative” films at SFF, including Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, which took top honors at Cannes. Unlike that film (which I did admire a great deal), Honey captivated me from start to finish. It’s not just a virtuoso filmmaking exercise; I never stopped wondering what would happen next, never stopped caring about the boy. Kaplanoğlu has marshalled his formidable talents to tell a very human story in an unusual way and the result is a remarkable artifact, as softly dazzling as candlelight on a dark emerald.

The Tree

Julie Bertucelli’s The Tree, starring Charlotte Gainsbourg, closed the Cannes Film Festival a couple of weeks ago before premiering in Australia on Sunday night at the State Theatre as part of the Sydney Film Festival. I’ve been going on about Aussie cinema a lot lately, so it was nice to be present at the premiere of such a noteworthy new Australian film. True, it’s a French co-production, with a French writer/director and an Anglo-French star; but the story, characters, and setting are as thoroughly grounded in Australia as the titular tree.

That tree is a very old, absolutely massive Moreton Bay fig that dominates the rural Queensland countryside for miles and dwarfs the two-story house inhabited by Dawn (Gainsbourg) and her family. When her husband suddenly dies, Dawn is left alone with four kids, and she’s hardly up to the task. A whimsical, irresponsible woman of nearly forty, who has never had a job and has always let others make decisions for her, she is now overwhelmed by grief. As months pass, she retreats into a shell, the household falls apart, and it seems her kids are raising her.

One of those kids, the 8-year-old Simone, becomes convinced her departed father communicates with her through the fig tree. She spends a lot of time nestled in its huge branches, talking to him. Dawn, as childlike as her daughter in many ways, grows to believe the same thing. The reassurance granted by that belief gives her the strength to try and get it together. This involves getting a job and, as it happens, seeing another man (Marton Csokas), which causes a rift between her and Simone. Increasingly Simone retreats to the tree for support and guidance; but the tree seems to have its own ideas.

The overt plot and central conflicts mark The Tree as a chick flick. It’s about family, grief and crisis, and learning to love. But it’s a splendidly abstract, low key chick flick, with a child’s sense of wonder, and beautiful performances. Gainsbourg inhabits a very difficult character with eccentric grace. The young Morgana Davies is superb as Simone. Csokas is all warmth and restrained intensity in the thankless role of the love interest who is, well, not a tree.

Bertuccelli depicts country life in Queensland with a prosaic touch. The house is ramshackle, its inhabitants humble and working-class. The interior design is nothing special; the children wear hand-me-downs. The highlight of the family’s year is driving a beat-up camper van to the beach for Christmas. The dialogue is straightforward and laconic in a classic Aussie way; a lot goes unsaid. All of this is presented plainly, with no effort to make it hip or stylish. As with rural people in real life, what they lack in cool, they make up in the natural beauty surrounding them.

The relationship of people with nature is a central part of the Australian psyche; the untamable wilderness of this land is often a force of reckoning in Australian fiction — characters discover or lose themselves when confronted by its power. The Tree carries on that tradition, but in a way that’s gentle and wonderfully organic. The characters go about their lives, the plot moves forward, but nature has a way of intruding. Some of the best moments in the film are the evocative little encounters with ants, frogs, bats, and jellyfish. The characters are captivated by these interruptions, and so are we, under the quiet spell woven by Bertucelli.

The tree is the main event of course. It’s gorgeously filmed — the luxuriant green leaves and hazy light filtering through its boughs effectively illustrate love and nurturing, and perhaps something more mysterious. The lush sound design helps make the tree a living presence. It intertwines with the characters’ lives, seems to envelop them and the story completely. There’s a little of the magic of Aronovsky’s The Fountain at work here in a more subtle format.

The Tree is a lovely, quiet little story about regular people — and it deserves mass appeal. But Bertucelli ingeniously makes the events of the film seem like a fable or a myth, and she’s crafted a fine new entry in the Australian canon.

Road, Movie

Road, Movie is an independent Indian film — and that’s a bigger deal than you might expect. India has a massive, globally successful film industry, with a long and proud history. You’d think this would create fertile ground for experimentation on the side; but surprisingly, independent filmmakers there don’t have it easy.

This reality hit me with Bombay Summer (Joseph Mathew, 2008), one of my favorite recent films. Produced with American financial backing, it’s far more like an American indie romance than the sort of film normally made in Bombay — moody, evocative, naturalistic, with exquisite photography and nicely human characterizations. Yet it’s a very Indian film too in that it captures the everyday feel of the place and the lives of its people — both rich and poor — better than anything I’ve seen, and also pays tribute to classic Bollywood music and art.

So it was discouraging to talk to the director Mathew and hear how hard it is to find interest in India for such films. And indeed some Indian friends who saw it said they didn’t like it — it’s boring — nothing happens — and so on. Indian films face a different set of audience expectations, and fierce competition tends to rule out deviation from convention.

I was glad to see another Indian indie featured at this year’s Sydney Film Festival. And Road, Movie (written and directed by Dev Benegal) has certain things in common with Bombay Summer. It’s an Indian-American coproduction that manages to be atmospheric and human, gritty and romantic all at once. It also cleverly salutes Bollywood. And likewise it co-stars the wonderful Tannishtha Chatterjee. (I’d happily watch Tannishtha talk about the Bombay Stock Exchange for a couple of hours.)

But Road, Movie is more abstract than Summer, more playfully weird, with a magical tone borrowed from the likes of Michel Gondry and Wes Anderson, but also from the Bollywood classics carted by its protagonists across India.

Abhay Deol plays Vishnu, a hapless young man who’s stuck inheriting his father’s hair oil business. He’s happy to be handed an excuse to drive a beat-up old mobile cinema van across India to its new owner and delay his cringe-inducing fate. Along the way he picks up an orphan (Mohammed Faisal), a fat old ganja-smoking entertainer (Satish Kaushik), and a beautiful widow (Chatterjee); together they drive literally off the beaten path and into the unknown. Of course they find the inevitable comedy, danger, and romance, or it wouldn’t be a road movie. But Benegal takes the elements of that tradition and shapes a quirky film that continually surprises. It’s charming, often hilarious, but also marked by a deliberate, observational pace, and anchored in a ground-level view of life in India.

The device of the journey allows Benegal to comment on Indian society: the middle-class city kid Vishnu rejects his upbringing and, once out on the road, discovers India as experienced by the poor: wandering, sleeping out in the open, worrying about the next meal. He meets people who have never seen a movie, people who have to fight for drinking water.

But Benegal nicely develops a sense of shifting destinies; as the journey continues, the open road takes on overtly mystical qualities, and eventually the characters arrive in a desert place, far away from everything else, where time seems to work differently and anything can happen.

The spectacular desert locations in Rajasthan provide a glimpse of a different India than usually depicted onscreen. Rather than being crowded, noisy, ornate, and saturated with color, Road, Movie is wide open, quiet, spare, and beaten by the sun. It’s still very colorful (this is India after all), but in a muted palette suggesting watercolors. It’s a gorgeous film.

The van is really something; it’s practically a character in the film. An enormous rickety old aquamarine thing, every square foot covered with custom art and detailing in tribute to Bollywood, it carries a projector, a screen, and a dusty, badly-kept store of prints, along with a few amenities for living and Vishnu’s hair oil. It’s part mobile cinema and part magic bus. Thankfully Benegal doesn’t get bogged down in cute self-reflexive references to film history or the filmmaking process (something I normally can’t stand). Instead the scenes in which Vishnu projects movies in ramshackle settings for downtrodden people are a fresh tribute to the childlike wonder the movies can inspire.

With the van as a comic base, and buffered by terrific acting from the leads, Benegal takes the film in many directions, mixing up moods and styles and borrowing from films east and west. Jim Jarmusch is obviously a strong influence, having practically invented the absurdist indie road movie. (This film, however, is stronger than anything Jarmusch has done in years.) There’s a satirical action sequence reminiscent of Robert Rodriguez. One haunting scene filmed on a dry salt flat in Rajasthan is a neat reminder of the Turkish director Derviş Zaim’s metaphysical thriller Dot.

Benegal is trying to do a lot here and is mostly successful. Sometimes the symbolism is a bit heavy-handed, the plot twists a little too wacky. But I gave Road, Movie a mile of leeway for its originality and heart, and liked it on many levels. I sincerely hope my Indian friends will give this one a chance and help make the world safe for adventurous Indian cinema.

Red Hill

The creators of the brutal, genre-mashing Australian thriller Red Hill have good timing. Ozploitation has been hip lately. Critics and audiences are reassessing the cycle of low-budget, often violent Aussie genre pictures that saw their heyday in the 1970s (as glorified in the 2008 documentary Not Quite Hollywood). Meanwhile a new breed of Ausie cult film has been thriving on the festival circuit and in video outlets. SFF 2010 features a few including The Loved Ones and Caught Inside. And the target clientele should be well pleased by this entry.

But Red Hill is no mere cash-in; writer-director Patrick Hughes comes out guns blazing in his debut, aiming high, going for a new kind of Australian cult film. Part Western, part horror, paying canny tribute to genre classics with lots of style and confidence, Red Hill is also ambitious enough to engage in Australian mythmaking.

Ryan Kwanten (True Blood) plays Shane, a young cop from the city who transfers with his pregnant wife to the town of Red Hill (pop. 120) in the high country of Victoria — a place where people actually get around on horseback. He quickly finds more than he bargained for amongst the suspicious locals and working under the hard-bitten, spiteful sheriff (Steve Bisley). Then all hell breaks loose when an apparently psychopathic escaped convict (Tommy Lewis) — a local Aboriginal cowboy put away for murdering his wife years ago — hits the town gunning for retribution.

The expository stuff is not the strength of this film — in fact, a few moments early in Red Hill resemble any other thriller found on late-night cable with choppy story editing and sometimes unsure acting. But the film hits its stride when the convict Jimmy arrives on the scene and starts shooting the place up. Hughes has clearly learned the elements of violent action mise-en-scène from masters like Walter Hill, Clint Eastwood, and Robert Rodriguez, with a big helping of horror à la John Carpenter. As the action escalates, each well-executed sequence employs gritty suspense and quiet restraint before its bloody payoff. And it’s always a pleasure when a genre piece nods at more upmarket fare; in this case, Hughes treats us to a knowing pastiche of No Country For Old Men. For fan-types this film will be a lot of fun to watch.

But there’s also a surprisingly powerful emotional element that deepens as the film goes on. Shane’s impending fatherhood and his questionable courage under fire resonate as the stakes increase; and as we find out more about the town’s dark past it becomes a key to the violence. The legendary quality is augmented by the nicely-shot rugged exteriors — big open spaces isolating the characters from civilization, from the present, and from each other.

Red Hill has plenty of awkward moments, but it comes together well before it reaches its wrenching climax. Hughes has crafted a grim tale that’s uniquely Aussie but should have broad appeal in any hemisphere. This is quality cult fare with welcome pretensions; and if Hughes can build from here he’ll be mentioned in the company of his influences one day.

South Solitary

The 2010 Sydney Film Festival formally opened at the State Theatre on Wednesday night with the world premiere of South Solitary, directed by Shirley Barrett and starring Miranda Otto, Marton Csokas, and Barry Otto. Barrett directed the Cannes-prizewinning Love Serenade (1992), also starring Miranda Otto, which happens to be playing in a restored version here at SFF; but she had not been active for the better part of a decade.

As I’ve stated a couple of times recently, I’m a relatively new but enthusiastic fan and supporter of Australian cinema. And it was heartening to see SFF opening with an Aussie prestige picture featuring popular and beloved local talent. So I’m very sorry to report I didn’t think it was a great film. Its heart is in the right place, and it has nice moments; but it suffers from poor execution and lack of an overarching vision, and is quite tedious at times.

South Solitary is set in 1927 on a remote island off New South Wales. Meredith (Miranda Otto) is a mousey single woman with lots of bad luck and no prospects, obliged to accompany her crotchety elderly uncle (Barry Otto), who has been put in charge of the lighthouse station on the island. There are only a handful of other people living on the ramshackle, maddeningly lonely station, and all of them are dysfunctional or abusive in one way or another. Indiscretions, ill-will, and bad fortune lead to Meredith being trapped on the island in a storm with Csokas’ character, an antisocial lighthouse keeper traumatized by the war. Whether they can learn to console each other’s pain and loneliness becomes the central issue.

Barrett admitted in her comments during the opening ceremony that the film had been completed the day before the premiere. Sadly it shows. The editing is quite rough, and the tone uneven. Some of the dialogue seems stilted (especially Barry Otto’s rants). A couple of major plot points are revealed in a confusing way; others produce groans. To the credit of the filmmakers, Solitary works hard. No fluffy historical epic, it’s refreshingly unromantic, and paints challenging portraits of difficult people. The bleak, grimly beautiful locations are an effective motif for the minimal plot and the emotionally stunted characters.

But things never quite come together. Where the film tries to be edgy, it merely seems murky and unformed; and where it could have used a pinch of romance or narrative drive to elevate it there is usually awkwardness. Miranda Otto is a good actress, and she does her best here. Her curiously neurotic Meredith is nonetheless sweet and charming, only hinting at depths she is too shy or browbeaten to share with most people. We end up caring for her, and are disappointed when the film provides so little else on which to anchor that feeling.

A friend who saw the film with me liked it a lot more than I did; so maybe she’s the target audience and I’m being as fussy as Barry Otto’s character. I’m glad an Australian filmmaker is working outside the box of standard historical romances — but this is a flawed film and I’m looking for more from Barrett’s next effort.

Structures

Last Friday night I saw Autechre perform here in Sydney at the Forum. It was apparently their first show in Australia in almost 15 years, which is about how long ago I saw them at a Warp Records night at the Shelter in New York. That was a memorable gig. Mind you I was a bit of a snob about house and Detroit techno in those days, and didn’t have much time for more abstract, less melodic, less soulful stuff. I remember hanging at the back with my arms crossed, daring them to impress. But honestly the sounds emanating from the huge stacks amazed me. They played some of the strongest beats I’ve ever heard. (I’ve never been able to keep my mind closed for any length of time with music. If it’s real, it’s going to get through to me.) Since that time I’ve become a fan.

The Forum is located in the middle of a recreational complex in Moore Park called the Entertainment Quarter. I wasn’t too impressed with EQ. A little too zoned and sanitized for my taste, a theme park trying to imitate a happening part of town. Though it was nice walking along the park to get there.

The venue itself is very impressive however. It’s a round space with Roman motifs, as its name suggests, and multiple levels with lots of great views encircling the room. The decor is plush in a restrained new-school way; I couldn’t help but be impressed at the lustrous green masonry forming the men’s urinal. The sound in the middle of the circle is very good.

I was with Chris, an old high school friend of my wife’s. We had met each other over drinks some time back and found we had a lot in common, especially music. Good to link up with like minds so far away from my roots. We had plenty of time to chat as we had to wait a good while for the show. There were two warmup DJs; one played an eclectic set that included some choice bits of obscure electro-pop. The other, named Rob Hall, mixed a very long set of uptempo tech stuff that was dynamic but, for me, lacking in melody and color. And there was little dancing, which was disappointing but not surprising knowing Autechre’s clientele. But Chris and his friends were digging it and there was plenty of goodwill among the assembled crowd as they waited patiently. The great thing about being a music fan in Australia is that when big acts from the northern hemisphere show up, the punters don’t take it for granted. They’re into it. Being jaded doesn’t really work here.

Going in I had thought the crowd would be entirely made up of older nerds, techies, and retired ravers. And there were surely a lot of them assembled. There were many beards, many pairs of glasses, many bald spots and ironic t-shirts. If terrorists had wanted to devastate Sydney’s computer systems by targeting the people who program and maintain them, they might have chosen that gig to make their attack. But there were also quite a few younger people, many of them on the hip side, including some women. (Honestly, I didn’t think there’d be any women at all, so I was pleasantly taken aback.) Autechre’s music is not really “cool” as such; it’s far more elemental than that. So it was hard for me to pinpoint what some of these younger club kids might have thought they were getting into.

One attendee made himself very visible and provoked a lot of amused discussion between us: he was a young kid on the dancefloor, leaning off to one side, wearing a Frankie Goes to Hollywood t-shirt and reading Schopenhauer. We couldn’t figure out how ironic he was trying to be. I decided it was an act of nerdy aggression. But I really have to hand it to him for his commitment and attention to detail.

If you’re like me, and you’re chuckling about this but really couldn’t provide even a brief summary of Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy, click here for the bullet points.

Autechre finally came on after midnight. As Chris wrote in a review on StrongLikeWater (his own blog — great name!), it’s hard to find words to describe their music. So I won’t try too hard. But it was very dense, very challenging stuff. Layers of incredibly broken beats forming and continually reforming into jagged shapes, never sustaining one pattern or tempo for very long; ferocious primal sub-bass; brutal shifting tones in place of melody. There were no lights of course. Just an inscrutable mountain of sound and the indicators on their machines. The overall effect was of being in the presence of something gigantic, invisible, barely comprehensible: an alien, an archangel, an artificial intelligence.

If you are not into Autechre, or maybe even if you are, it might have just sounded like noise. But that’s not quite right. I’ve always abhorred noise in music for its own sake. Autechre’s music is not noise. Actually it’s just the opposite: noise is sound that is confused, without a structure. But Autechre’s creations are very structured, indeed, sometimes (as on this night) made of nothing else but structure. They’re not posers making noise out of cynicism or a lack of talent; they’re craftsmen. Architects of sound. Famously many of their compositions are based on complex equations programmed into their machines. But lurking somewhere down (very far down) inside is an overriding love of music. It’s like a science-fiction version of free jazz.

That said, did I enjoy this show? Not so much. Waiting three hours with not a lot of musical inspiration beforehand had taken its toll; my back hurt from standing in one place and I’d had too much lager and not enough to eat. Confronted by the monolithic sound issuing from the darkened stage, I admit I shrank a bit — I even went to sit outside a couple of times. (Though I did enjoy how good the sound was out there; they’d made the club into one big speaker.)

Autechre’s been recording for eighteen years; there’s spare atmosphere and a rare kind of beauty in a lot of their music. Check out “Clipper” (from 1995), and “Altibzz” (2008). Was I was hoping for too much to hear a little more of that during the show — a little space to breathe, a little light? Does that make me less than hardcore?

But most of the fans were right there with it, rapt, nodding their heads, clapping and cheering at the few breakdowns in the whirling black cloud of sound. I really have to hand it to Autechre for finding a worldwide audience with the most difficult music.

The video is not from this show — it was shot on their home turf of Manchester three years ago — but it’s a pretty good representation of what they were doing here. The funny thing is, listening to this at home, it’s much more appealing to me. I can grasp the patterns, hear the traces of melody, and dig the beats a lot more. Autechre’ music rewards patience and repeated listens. The show was hard to tune into, but maybe it opened me up a bit more to what they’re doing. And their oblique recordings now sound light and melodic by comparison.

Early Days

This week I had a new post published on the Sydney Film Festival blog. It’s about appreciating Australian cinema from an American perspective, and how I’m psyched about the Aussie entries in the festival. I didn’t have to embellish it; I really do love the films of my adopted country. If it’s a pessimistic industry cliché that most Australians don’t support their own films, at least I always will.

A lot of that has to with marrying a local of course. My wife has diligently seen to my education in Aussie film. But she didn’t have to push very hard. Ever since I first visited and wanted to live here, I’ve been hungry for any material, any books or films, that might inspire me and give me clues about the place. I think we tend to underestimate the way we can learn even from fiction. Joseph Campbell wrote that a great way to get an education is to pick one author you love and respect and read everything he or she wrote. One of my chosen “authors” has been Australian cinema.

Of course I don’t yet have anything like a comprehensive knowledge of Australian films. (In case I foolishly thought I did, Roderick Heath would be around to smack me down.) But I’ve seen quite a few, enough to realize I’m a fan. And, working on my little piece, the more I thought about it, the more I remembered I’ve loved a number of Aussie films ever since I was a kid. I guess I’ve always been drawn to them.

One of my earliest cinematic memories is watching Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975) when it was first out on cable TV, which was still a wondrous new thing in our household. Today I marvel at the influence of cable in bringing foreign and independent films to us regular folks in the States who would otherwise have had no access to them. And I have to hand it to my dad for his often adventurous choices in home viewing, opening me up to all kinds of films at a young age.

I was fascinated by this, my first Australian film, a neo-gothic tale about the mysterious disappearance of some schoolgirls in the wilderness of Victoria in 1900. I was pretty young, and didn’t understand much of what was going on, but Weir’s uncanny, sun-baked, ghostly atmosphere pulled me right in. I now know the film is meant to be opaque; but even then I think I liked not knowing — I was already realizing there’s something kind of cool about that.

The vast wilderness in the center of the country as symbolic force of destiny — strange, unknowable, often destructive — is a key device in Australian fiction, and it achieves quintessence here. If you haven’t seen it, be careful about watching it late at night; this movie is unbelievably creepy considering very little actually happens. The great use of sound to communicate mystery and unnamed primal terror was hair-raising to me as a kid, and still is.

Picnic is justly considered an Australian classic. You can see why in this clip. But it also shows two things that hamper any viewing or consideration of it. One is Zamfir’s flute playing, which only sounds eerie and evocative the first ten times you hear the same melody played before it becomes grating. Far worse is the screechy performance of the voice actress in the overdubbed dialogue of one of the young characters. Considering how important sound is to the film, those awkward overdubs are a real killer.

This film was huge in kicking off the Aussie New Wave, a golden age in which a lot of films were made here with a lot of worldwide success, including Weir’s Gallipoli (1981), Gillian Armstrong’s My Brilliant Career (1979), and Bruce Beresford’s Breaker Morant (1980). Maybe you saw some of them on cable as a kid, like I did.

But like many Americans of my generation, the first Australian film I was truly passionate about was The Road Warrior (1981). George Miller’s wildly creative vision still epitomizes post-apocalyptic fiction of course. And it holds up as a film because, much like the original Star Wars, it was crafted with a 70s independent spirit. Not to mention its fabulous postmodern, postpunk design sensibility. In his essay “Return to Oz,” Roderick Heath makes the same comparison to Star Wars, saying that Miller was “channelling a legendary atmosphere,” and called it possibly the most influential Australian film ever made.

Looking at it now, it’s a wonderfully Aussie film in spirit too. Of course there are the amazing outback settings; but it also distills the Aussie character — the grit and wit — while largely avoiding clichés.

I started watching clips of The Road Warrior online and was a little suprised at how compelling it was even on the little window with bad quality. Go on, see if it doesn’t make you want to watch more.

I ended up watching the whole thing in sections. It’s not a revelation — I’ve never stopped loving all three Mad Max films. But I hadn’t seen this for a while. One thing I noticed this time is the brilliant visual storytelling. It flows like no other film of its kind. For an action film it has unusual emotional weight, a weary frustration and despair on the part of all the characters, even the bad guys. The wordless scene between the Feral Kid and Max, whose wife and young son were murdered by gang members, is transcendent. And there’s a queasy logic, a melancholy sense of detail, about the way the film projects the world after things fall apart. It seems all too plausible we’d be fighting each other for gasoline with crossbows looted from department stores, and hanging on to a few dusty, pathetic artifacts.

I’m pretty much over worrying about the end of the world. But tell me this kind of thing doesn’t occur to you with petroleum spewing into the Gulf of Mexico and apparently no way to stop it.

By the way, I decided on the Feral Kid as this blog’s namesake and muse a long time ago. I didn’t expect to be posting video with him featured in it so soon. But it goes to show you how influential this film was in my life and still is.