Being already familiar with the real incidents forming the backbone of Ali Abbasi’s feminist thriller- serial killing of prostitutes in the religious city of Mashhad – what struck me the most about it was a formal quality with its phenomenological implications. Inarguably stemming from conditions of its production – a film set in Iran, but shot outside that country- and an artistic decision partially made out of necessity, the film is characterised with a plethora of close-ups and tight shots, while its looser frames are marked by a shallow depth of field that obscures the backgrounds out of recognition. As a result, it seems to be particularly surveying pain and destitute in every pore, wrinkle and imperfection of the prostitutes’ faces and therefore paints their misery with the coarsest brush, whilst picturing characters as isolated figures engaged in a nightly cat and mouse game. Whereas the serial killer of the film has his own real-life counterpart, Abbasi deviates from the real story by devising his foil as an inquisitive female reporter, who is as well an outsider in the religious city. By moving back and forth between the two characters and eventually bringing them face to face, Abbasi dramatises the quest for the murderer into a battle of sexes, whilst emphasising the institutionalised violence and discrimination issued against Iranian women of all walks of life and posits them as the root of anti-hero’s killing spree. The film limns a complicated picture of killer as one with a troubled soul, who is treated like a pawn by the ideological system. His harrowing fit after being accidentally hit on the head with a ball by his son is revelatory in that sense; it exposes his inner turbulences and gives lie to the composure with which he morally justifies his crimes in public. Less so can be said about the female reporter – played by Zar Amir Ebrahimi, herself a victim of patriarchal hypocrisy in reality – who is simply a dramatic vehicle for identification and heightening the suspense. She adds a feminist edge to the film, but following the arrest of the killer her function is almost reduced to that of a witness. The most blood-curdling moment of the film doesn’t belong to the murders, but to their re-enactment by the serial killer’s son for the reporter’s camera. Not only does he play them so casually, he even asks her younger sister to lie motionless and stand in for the victims. Ending his film on this note, Abbasi warns about a long and arduous battle ahead for prevention of similar atrocities from happening.
Holy spider
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In partnership with Cinematheque Quebecoise, the festival also hosted a comprehensive retrospective on Bruce LaBruce, the controversial Canadian filmmaker known for leaping between the mainstream cinema and pornography. Bruce’s newest The Affairs of Lidia, shown as a softcore version– was part of the package. Made for a Barcelona-based company advocating ‘ethical’ and ‘feminist’ porn – Erik Lust Films- the film follows its titular character, who after being told by her husband about his intention to divorce, finds a photographer as his male paramour. Also discovering other people who have an affair with the photographer, she arranges for a party to exposes infidelities and then transforms into an all-out orgy. Attending a conversation with another filmmaker- Éric Falardeau- about pornography during the festival, LaBruce talked about his preference for having pornography ratw and gritty and not refined by an artistic treatment; his film however counters this statement. The same applies to a short film he made for the same company- Valentine, Pierre and Catalina– which unlike The Affairs of Lidia was shown in a hardcore version; despite the explicit contents, the images and the tone of this short film is also informed by a sense of refinement, to the degree that it never felt out of place in a ‘cinematheque’. One would suspect how much of this can be put down to the demands of the producing company.
Conceived as a ‘cross between fashion and porn’ according the director, The Affairs of Lidia features a jovial and light-hearted tone, which are in line with its high-key visuals. It can be argued that incorporating elements of the fashion world intensified the aesthetic aspect and the element of the taste and has brought the film closer to the domain of applauded porno-chics by likes of Radley Metzger. Both of LaBruce’s films for Erika Lust Films show the reversal of traditional power dynamics in porn; in both film it is a female character who directs the others and instigates a pan-sexual bacchanalia. The Affairs of Lidia features its artistic flair not only in its use of split screen and multiplied screen which come close to multi-panel canvases, but also in moments such as juxtaposition within the same frame of the gay couple’s sex and the straight sex on the TV screen. The film’s dialogues are decidedly meant to be comic and have a deliberate camp quality, but this has done with some moderation which saves them from feeling utterly banal and ridiculous.
The Affairs of Lidia
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As a direct response to the experience of living through pandemic, Bertrand Bonello’s new film is a reflection on the concomitant sense of helplessness experienced in face of the unpredictable forces beyond one’s control. To picture this, Bonello builds a composite network of images, with the main thread being the daily life a teenage girl who lives almost a solitary existence through pandemic and her recurrent nightmares of being caught a dark forest. This is interspersed with scenes of her dolls that come to life to enact some sort of a soap opera and those showing the owner of an internet character called Patricia Coma who issues aphorism and advertises her products. The threads seem to be intricately connected – probably it is the girl’s imagination that animates the dolls, while she is in turn under Patricia’s influence – and over the course of the film get gradually mixed up and sometime find an echo in each other. The girl seems to be caught between fear of her nightmares of a limbo and despair over lack of control. The latter is also represented by a game device, advertised by Patricia, that one can never make a mistake with, for it invariably follows – or perhaps guides- the user’s mind. In conjunction with brief shots of surveillance cameras monitored by invisible observers, the device suggest the lack of control on an additional level. In this context, the desire to regain control translates into a wish for making an error and for the failure of the device, which incidentally occurs nowhere other than inside the limbo of the nightmare. The unnerving nightmare therefore becomes an escape route, one that also gives protection against the controlling of surveillance cameras. As such, the film redefines limbo – the situation many found themselves amidst pandemic- not a site of fear, but a site for hope. The film is bracketed between two sets of images accompanied by a voice-over. The almost undiscernible images of the opening give way to shots of wild eruption of forces of nature, signalling a change of attitude and comprehension, as seemingly experienced by the film’s young heroine.
Coma
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Hadn’t the esteemed animator and the academy award nominee, Theodore Ushev made it clear that his dystopian saga was four years in making, one would have been inclined to link its inception to the recent predominance of virtual experience. Dealing with questions of materiality and impermanence, Phi 1.618 feels as if being designed for this very moment. The technologically immortalised ‘protagonist’ – referred to as calligrapher- is tasked with transcribing the entire written heritage into digital format and destroying the originals, hence trading their physicality with virtual immortality. Before he proceeds to destroy the last book, however, it materialises as a woman and, conscious of the calligrapher’s feeling for a beautiful woman who is eternally frozen like a sleeping beauty, entices him to embark on a journey to obtain a magical potion that would end her slumber. Not much action-oriented as expected, the film is more like a journey of awakening and purification, one which ends in stripping the calligrapher from immortality, just as he does the same to the frozen lady by awakening her. That’s why the man’s leaving and return to the fortress of immortals is treated with less than usual dramatic emphasis. This is a purifying journey that might call to mind those the protagonists of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s works embarks on, minus all extreme elements. To resuscitate his beloved, the calligrapher eventually has to erase all transcribed digital copies; the books are now embodied by him and he, in rejection of the lack of materiality, literally gives them a body. Phi 1.618 also proves a smooth transition in Ushev’s filmmaking career from animations which fall more on the experimental side to a live-action with a more or less straightforward narrative. Understandably, the animation still has a place in the film, but it’s used selectively for particular moments – notably, flashbacks about characters that don’t show up in the film and meet a violent death- and doesn’t compromise the film’s formal unity. In a certain scene the film even attains a borderline quality by showing characters as shadows and silhouettes; it’s the scene with the blissfully ephemeral characters who reside underground, hence narratively justifiable.
Phi 1.618
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Fabrice du Welz’s new psychological thriller also deals in a metaphorical way with a living book, one that served more than an unseen muse to a writer and now has come back to claim her presumed rights. Presenting ‘a stranger bringing upheaval to a well-heeled household’ narrative through the prism of ‘the mad love’, the film is set in country mansion belonging to the heiress of a wealthy publisher and a book editor in her own right, who lives there with her supposedly successful but apparently struggling writer husband and their little daughter, Lucie. When a strange girl called Gloria who feigns running into them by chance establishes herself in their place, some well-kept secrets which are the roots of the writer’s current block ooze out and tear down the cardboard house of happiness. The overall course of the plot seems somehow predictable, as the first scenes with Gloria signal something shady about her and warns us that she is up to no good. Thanks to the top-notch performances and the director’s masterful handling of his material, this doesn’t make the film any less engaging, even if it cannot match the audacity of the Belgian director’s previous film, Adoration. One can easily fathom the disintegration of the family is coming, but still feels intrigued as to how the plot thickens; the presentation of Gloria in particular goes a long way to achieve this effect. Though the film doesn’t make any doubt about her conniving character and spiteful actions, she is treated with some ambiguity and her unbridled emotions seem to have a redeeming effect. In that respect, Gloria comes off as less sympathetic than ‘fiendish’ heroine of Adoration, however in a manner not dissimilar to the latter she acts as a guide to mischief and initiates Lucie to demonstrate her rebellion and show her wild during her birthday party. This and Gloria’s own brazen scheme set a point of contrast for behaviour of women of older generation which is recounted in dialogues (Grandma who’s sacrificed herself for her fascist lover). To add to her ambiguity, the film never expressly reveals Gloria’s identity and her connection to the writer, while exposes the latter as a conman, an opportunist and one not much worthy of the spectators’ affections.
Inexorable
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Disturbing is probably the first term coming to mind to describe Alberto Vazquez’s adult-oriented animation and in that respect Unicorn wars does one better than the filmmaker’s earlier feature. Admittedly, using medium of cartoon to deliver violent content has been quite common, especially in the context of the Japanese animation and the world of anime. But what amplifies the unsettling quality in the work of the Spanish animator is his choice of characters. They look too cute and innocent in the first glance to participate in the gory violence of the film; what’s more, here they are chosen from figures corresponding to the realm of childhood. Portrayed in the film is a world populated by teddy bears and unicorns, who are engaged in a religiously enshrined eternal feud that would not settle until one goes extinct. The main characters, teddy bear recruits, seem to be of an indefinite age, stuck eternally in childhood in their outward appearance; a fact that makes their bursting into most vicious acts and the injuries inflicted upon them very jarring. Mimicking the dogma-driven militaristic campaigns which have haunted human history, the film fulfils a parodic function, but one with a distinct bitter taste. It culminates in an apocalyptic battle, the outcome of which is ironically the rise of a humanoid figure.
Unicorn wars
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With Small, Slow, but Steady, Sho Miyake proposes a different type of sport film, one shaped and delivered through familiar aesthetics of ‘arthouse’ films. The film employs the common character types of the young athlete and their senior trainer, but puts a different spin on their narratives which places the film far away from the established conventions. Despite the potentials presented by the main characters of the film – a young boxer woman with hearing disability and the ailing headman of her club – there’s a sustained effort in the film against over-dramatisation. Stylistic choices like static frames and minimal use of music aside, there is also a fixation on those mundane and insignificant moments – in training or daily lives- which would have been considered wholly redundant in an action-driven film. The film even assumes a documentary-like quality when the headman gives an interview about the girl. In line with this approach, we are given more shots of the girl in training than her actual matches. In the first of the two matches – one that qualifies her as a professional athlete – the film directly takes us to the final round, but even then we are only shown a brief glimpse of actual sparring; instead the camera lingers more on close-up of her anticipating the result. It wouldn’t be an overstatement to call the film truer to the spirit of athleticism. The film still develops a narrative arc around the young woman’s will to move forward and her doubts, the deteriorating health of the headman, as well as the impending closure of the gym that interlinks the two threads, but they are all delivered in a measured pace that frustrates the conventional expectations. At one point we see a young man taking the camera from the girl’s mother to record her match; in the context of a typical film this could foreshadow the blossom of a romantic thread, but Small, Slow, but Steady completely steers clear of that path. At another point, the filmmaker takes advantage of the girl’s disability to create an intentional distance: she is shown in conversation through sign language with her other mute friend, but we remain clueless as what they are talking about. The film is not totally anticlimactic and there a final fight where we can see more action, but overall it operates on a different register compared to a conventional sport film and delivers its content in a truer-to-life fashion and with more reserve. Its title can in fact be as much descriptive of the heroine’s journey as of the film itself.
Small, Slow, but Steady
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Similar to many other non-genre film festivals, Festival du Nouveau Cinéma saves a spot in its programming for weird and zany genre pictures and this year this spot was assigned to a series of shorts by the Japanese director Kenichi Ugana, packaged in programme titled Made in Ugana. Played together, Ugana’s shorts suggest director’s two-pronged approach in making low-budget sci-fi/horror. Films such as Coexistence and Fluffy show more restrain in using genre by blunting generic element to a comic effect, and even invite some quasi-intellectual vibes. Embodied by – rather inexpensive – practical props, alien creatures of these films make an unassuming presence; they either engage in a simple everyday conversation with human characters (Fluffy) or just silently and innocuously accompany them (Coexistence), while the whole thing is delivered by means of a simple and modest mise-en-scène. In both abovementioned films, the environment where otherworldly entities crop up is marked by a sense of ennui and uneventfulness, to which the alien can add a tinge of excitement. Other films such as Visitors present gorier effects and action and feel closer to the generic fare. Both groups are united in their deadpan humour, a quality originating from a nonchalant reaction (by one or every character) to the uncanny, or from the idiosyncratic monster, or both. The director described his films as responses to unaccountable and unpredictable events in our daily lives, which might lead us to suspect that their poker-face humour could be a reflection of his own world view. The showcase of Ugana’s films testifies to tendencies and influences that pull his films in opposite directions, but also to his capability of striking a balance between them. It is through his vision that influences from Coffee and Cigarettes and The Evil Dead (two sources of inspiration that he pointed out) can reconcile and blend together with ease, demonstrating that that the twain can sometime meet.
Made in Ugana
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