SLIFF 2011: Before Your Eyes

2009 // Germany - Turkey // Miraz Bezar // November 16, 2011 // Theatrical DVD (Landmark Plaza Frontenac Theater)

The setting of Before Your Eyes—the grimy flats and back alleys of Diyarbakır in southeastern Turkey—might be light years from the experiences of most Western viewers, but the film’s story follows a familiar template: orphaned children learn how to survive on their own in a cruel world. Ten-year-old Gülîstan (Senay Orak) and her little brother Firat (Muhammed Al) have a meager but generally happy life, dwelling in a tiny apartment with their newborn sister and politically active Kurdish parents. Happy, that is, until the family car is stopped by a squad of Turkish paramilitary thugs, who abruptly execute the parents and speed off into the night. Broken and hollowed by the horror of this event, Gülîstan and Firat live for a time under the care of their mother’s sister. However, after she vanishes, the children are forced to sell off all the family’s belongings to obtain money for food and formula. Eventually, the landlord tosses the kids into the street, where they fall in with a dodgy yet colorful roster of street vendors, pickpockets, and whores.

Dealing as it does with the slow-motion tragedy of children who have no one to care for them and nowhere to go, Before Your Eyes is a wrenching, deeply sad film. Granted, compared to the shattering, abyssal intensity of Grave of the Fireflies—with which it shares some narrative and emotional beats—the film is positively light-hearted. However, any feature in which children are so routinely placed in harm’s way is still fairly harrowing stuff, and Before Your Eyes’ grimness is ameliorated only occasionally by bits of wry comedy and small, hesitant triumphs. Despite its focus on the street-level experiences of Gülîstan and Firat, the film is moderately political, and not just due to its sympathetic treatment of Kurds victimized by violent Turkish authoritarianism. A sequence where a crestfallen Firat is unable to pay for his infant sister’s cough syrup is practically a PSA for health care's status as a vital human right. Moreover, the whole enterprise explicitly presents itself as a tribute and vague appeal for the forgotten urban children of the world.

Orak and Al give marvelously authentic performances that highlight the resourcefulness, shrewdness, and almost heartbreaking toughness of kids in dire circumstances. The film has profound pity and respect for Gülîstan and Firat, but devotes little time to conveying the contours of their emotional lives. (On this point, Before Your Eyes suffers in comparison to another film it recalls, So Yong Kim's superlatively empathetic Treeless Mountain.) The film's approach forgoes social realism in the name of sorrowful melodrama, which is a reasonable but uninteresting choice. The Dickensian turn in the third act, when Gülîstan encounters her parents' murderer by pure happenstance, is both wholly appropriate for the film’s tone and also disappointingly preposterous.

SLIFF 2011: 9:06

2009 // Slovenia // Igor Sterk // November 15, 2011 // Theatrical DVD (Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema)

The bloody fingerprints of The Tenant cover the Slovenian psychological mystery 9:06, which shares the suffocating fatalism and crumbling sense of self that characterize Roman Polanski’s unnerving 1976 film. However, where Polanski’s Trelkovsky is bullied and manipulated into becoming a gender-bending double of the deceased woman who once owned his Parisian flat, the protagonist of 9:06 plunges into the enveloping identity of a dead man for reasons that remain his own. This is no creepshow feature of urban paranoia, but a somber tale about the mysterious authority of guilt, despair, and self-loathing.

Police detective Dusan (Igor Samobor) is at a shaky crossroads in his personal life, as he tries to juggle a spiteful ex-wife whom he hates, an adopted daughter whom he loves, and a young girlfriend who is growing dissatisfied with his phantom comings and goings. Foremost on his mind, however, is a perplexing suicide case, in which a reclusive young pianist stopped his car on a bridge and leapt into the gorge below. The odd details of the case intrigue Dusan: The complete absence of hair on the victim’s body; logs of bizarre online activities; associates who seem unaware that the pianist is dead; and the possibly significant recurrence of the time 9:06. The detective snoops around the deceased man’s vacant apartment for breadcrumbs, and—for reasons that he does not entirely understand—eventually begins sleeping there. The suicide case gradually starts to devour Dusan’s waking hours, feeding on his remorse from a past sin. The detective barely seems aware that he has silently passed out of the realms of an official investigation and deep into the outlands of obsessive madness.

The film presents Dusan’s disintegration with an intense, moody restraint. The script is sparing, rarely stating outright what can more gracefully be implied with cool offhandedness. The film observes the detective’s movements with an ominous care, leaving the viewer to discern what they can from the garish cracks in his otherwise sphinx-like manner. Underneath its arid surface, 9:06 proffers a disconcerting depiction of oblivion’s squirming allure. The personal effects of the pianist—neatly folded clothes, car keys, shaving utensils—become compass needles that all orient the detective in the same dread direction. However, Dusan is no Hamlet: Far from seething in the shadow of death, he seems to shuffle towards it with the blank resignation of a volcano’s sacrificial victim. Chilling stuff.

SLIFF 2011: 23 Minutes to Sunrise

2012 // USA // Jay Kanzler // November 14, 2011 // Theatrical DVD (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

The film-makers who were on hand to introduce the SLIFF screening of St. Louis-based mini-indie 23 Minutes to Sunrise cheerfully conceded that the cut about to be shown was still a little rough around the edges. However, the film’s crudity has less to do with its incomplete color and sound than with the more fundamental flaws in its assembly. While Leonard Cohen growls his way through "Everybody Knows" over the opening credits, four couples slowly converge on a greasy spoon during the wee hours of the night. (The musical selection recalls the same song’s prominent use in Exotica, a film with which 23 Minutes shares a forlorn aura and equitable regard for its characters.) The film is, at bottom, a kind of ensemble Dark Night of the Soul story, and the archetypes that gather at the diner are well-worn: a weary husband and wife (Bob Zany and Nia Peeples) who talk in circles about their flailing relationship; an anxious, hot-headed criminal (Tom Sandoval) and his reluctant girlfriend (Kristen Doute); a sweet-as-molasses waitress (Jilanne Klaus) with a ungrateful lout of a husband at home; and a veteran-turned-cook (Dingani Beza) whose rambling voice-over ruminations on life and God mark him as the doubtful hero of this tale. To these players the film adds its wild cards in the form of an eerie young woman (Haley Busch) and her menacing older companion (Eric Roberts), a pair whose elliptical conversations mark them as unquestionably not-from-around-here.

There is no way around that reality that 23 Minutes is amateurish stuff, a fact betrayed by profuse continuity goofs and often confused editing. The soapy dialog and musical cues wander into snicker-worthy territory at times, and the film lacks the pacing and rhythm necessary to keep a single-location story such as this moving along. Most unforgivably for a film that makes significant narrative hay over a deadline, its presentation of time is absurdly slipshod: seconds seem to last minutes, and minutes seem to last seconds, depending on the scene in question. Despite these problems, there is much to commend in the small details of 23 Minutes to Sunrise. The hesitant romance between Beza’s and Klaus’ characters is touching and naturalistic, and admirably disregards the racial and age dimensions without making a show of its disregard. Excepting the Mystery Couple of Busch and Roberts, the characters are well-drawn and all markedly pitiable in differing ways, even if they are not all sympathetic. Most intriguing of all, 23 Minutes is defiantly resistant to generic categorization. Coiled underneath its veneer of stale melodrama, crime-thriller tension, and mild comic business is a kind of feature-length Twilight Zone episode sans a big reveal. The supernatural eventually rears its head, but never in a manner that definitively places the story within a particular family of fictional conventions. The film lacks a verbose Explanation Scene, and never clarifies exactly why Roberts’ sinister stranger seems to be the dark pole star around which the story’s events rotate. Far from being a maddening fatal flaw, this ambiguity is arguably the most innovative thing 23 Minutes to Sunrise has going for it.

SLIFF 2011: Pig

2011 // USA // Henry Barrial // November 13, 2011 // Theatrical HDCAM (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

The intrinsic grittiness of low-budget independent film-making ultimately contributes to the uncanny mood of the conceptually ambitious thriller Pig. Writer-director Henry Barrial’s script lays out a scenario with echoes of other noir-tinted puzzle-box films such as The Game, Oldboy, and Memento. However, in its cinematic execution, the story discovers a disorienting, dream-like aura that places it in the hinterlands of David Lynch country. A Man (Rudolph Martin) awakens hooded and bound in the desert with no memory of his identity. He carries only a scrap of paper scrawled with a name: “Manny Elder.” After collapsing from exhaustion, he finds himself in the care of a beautiful widow, Isabel (Heather Ankeny), who entices him to stay with her and her young son at their remote desert home. However, the confounding visions that flash through the Man’s mind compel him to search for his identity, leading him into Los Angeles and through a succession of strange encounters. By the end of the first act, the story has undergone a drastic realignment that deepens the narrative mystery even as it narrows the film’s potential. From that moment on, it’s apparent that Pig’s story must necessarily rest on a dream, a science-fiction conceit, or a malevolent conspiracy of epic proportions. (Or all three).

There’s a streak of faintly dissatisfying conservatism to Pig’s final scenes, but it has less to do with the film’s message or style than with the inherent limitations of genre storytelling. No explanation that the film might offer for its strange events could realistically maintain the narrative’s internal integrity and also preserve the unsettling mood that pervades the bulk of its scenes. A splendidly crafted but radically different style is on display in a particular film-within-the-film sequence, suggesting that the atmosphere that pervades Pig elsewhere represents an adroit utilization of the baseline indie aesthetic. The Los Angeles of the film is kin to the weird, diabolical metropolis of Lynch’s doppelganger triptych (Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and INLAND EMPIRE). It’s a sunny-yet-ominous place full of offhandedly eccentric moments, vaguely sinister spaces, and banal and often anachronistic objects that seem to roil with significance. In the final analysis, the film is more invested in presenting a story that glistens with philosophical relevance for our current age than in exploiting the horrifying potential of its disorienting atmospherics. Still, while it lasts, Pig is disarming stuff, the kind of sly little genre experiment that reveals the parched cinematic imagination that characterizes most studio thrillers.

SLIFF 2011: Shame

2011 // UK // Steve McQueen // November 12, 2011 // Digital Theatrical Projection (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

With his sophomore feature film, Shame, director Steve McQueen once again ruthlessly observes as Michael Fassbender subjects himself to a hideous regimen of self-annihilation. However, whereas McQueen's stunning 2008 debut, Hunger, depicted an IRA true believer forgoing food as an act of political protest, the director's new film focuses on a man utterly dominated by sexual compulsions. Brandon (Fassbender) leads a quintessential lonely New York City bachelor life, one bounded by a successful New-New Economy career and aseptic one-bedroom apartment, but defined by the relentless pursuit of orgasm. "Libido" seems too feeble a word to describe Brandon's drives, which are akin to a yawning, ravenous void that he fills with an endless succession of one-night-stands and call girls (not to mention habitual wanks in the office restroom). Into this frenzied pit of sexual need tumbles Brandon's little sister, Cissy (Carey Mulligan), a struggling torch-singer who crashes on his couch when she finds herself back in New York and between lovers. Needless to say, Cissy's presence sets Brandon on edge, not only because of their sharp personality clashes, but because Baby Sis throws a monkey-wrench into his sexual routine.

Regardless of whether Brandon's disengaged, hypersexual behavior truly constitutes “sexual addiction,” (or whether such an affliction even exists), the man is plainly engaged in a fearsome cycle that is spiraling slowly and inevitably downward, a cycle he seems to find personally repugnant and yet is unable to halt. There's no denying that Shame is a psychologically ugly film, repugnant in a way that even Hunger never managed. The latter film at least grapples with the alleged moral purity of self-destruction for ideological reasons, even if it never fully embraces such a view. By comparison, Brandon's carnal pursuits contain not a hint of joyful hedonism, just a slack inertia and a whopping dose of self-hatred. In the main, the film relies on Fassbender's exceedingly raw performance to convey the foulness of Brandon's rutting, rather than on seedy style or production design. To wit: There is a extended threesome scene late in the film that is lovingly shot in golden hues, scored with rapturous strings, and edited to take the viewer sleekly from one position and act to the next. And yet Fassbender's face contains all the evidence necessary to illustrate that this erotic marathon is an act of supreme unhappiness and loathing.

It's this kind of bold upending of expectations—and the refusal to indulge in cinematic laziness—that makes McQueen's film-making approach so invigorating, no matter how unpleasant the subject matter. The director's use of anamorphic widescreen is, if anything more striking here than in Hunger, and his camera placement and use of long takes are just as thrilling. Returning cinematographer Sean Bobbitt presents a cool, gorgeous urban landscape that glints with a distinctly Gotham atmosphere. Meanwhile, the film's look also subtly complements its deep aura of twenty-first century despair, with all the directionless anxiety that implies. Buried deep in the script is a suggestion that family abuse is at the root of Brandon and Cissy's problems, but Shame isn't particularly interested in excavating the siblings' deeply scarified psyches in search of personal demons to exorcise. This is gruesome portraiture, pure and simple, executed largely without the pleasure of a redemptive narrative arc. The film simply wants us to look unflinchingly at Brandon and consider how such an outwardly functional but inwardly broken person could be created and sustained.

SLIFF 2011: A Dangerous Method

2011 // Canada // David Cronenberg // November 11, 2011 // Theatrical Projection (Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema)

For a film that ostensibly concerns itself with the relationship between pioneering psychiatrists Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen), A Dangerous Method offers little insight into the ways in which these men transformed one another, personally and professionally. That isn't so much a criticism as an observation that that while film is quite invested in charting the emotional topography between the two men, each is hunkered down in a bunker constructed of their particular intellectual and emotional idiosyncrasies. Much is made of their contrasts: Swiss and Austrian, Gentile and Jew, young and old. Director David Cronenberg and screenwriter Christopher Hampton (who adapted the film from his own stage play, The Talking Cure, which is in turn based on David Kerr's book A Most Dangerous Method) don't allow either man to change much over the course of the film, particularly Freud, who is more professionally settled, more risk-averse, and deeply entrenched in the correctness of his theories. (There is a suggestion that if the pair had been closer contemporaries, their professional dynamic would have been vastly different.) The film presents both men as ahead-of-their-time giants, each naturally attracted to flame of the other's intellect, and each quietly harboring a remarkably liberated worldview. The story of A Dangerous Method is in large part about how these men went from enthusiastic professional colleagues with deep, mutual admiration—Freud even comments at one point that Jung is his de facto successor—to frosty rivals who barely speak to one another.

It is the film's third primary character who is granted a genuine arc. Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley) is a Russian Jewess with severe mental scars, but who nonetheless has ambitions to become a psychiatrist herself. When the film opens, Spielrein is shown to be barely functional, suffering from debilitating psycho-sexual fits elicited by feelings of humiliation and other stimuli. She is brought into Jung's care at his hospital in Zurich, and over the course of the film's eight or so years, she undergoes a transformation from psychic cripple to one of the first female psychoanalysts in the world. Spielrein's case serves as a validation of Jung's ambitions to actually cure patients of their unresolved psychological ailments, but the film posits a far more pivotal role for the woman in this erotic-medical-professional triangle. As Jung dryly observes, Spielrein is “something of a catalyst” on those around her. Her presence (and her nascent psychiatric theories) open up Jung to repressed sexual urges of his own, and before long the two are engaged in an intense, sadomasochistic-flavored affair. Ultimately, the acrid aftermath of Jung and Speilrein's relationship reverberates through the psychoanalytical community, and--in perhaps the film's most fictional leap--splits open the divisions between Jung and Freud that had already been forming. There is a quiet suggestion, through all of this academic turmoil, that Jung and Speilrein would have been an excellent match, but that circumstances (and Jung's cowardice and self-righteousness) precluded a future for the couple. The film keeps this romantic tragedy element admirably understated without muting it entirely, such that when Jung admits late in the film that his adoration for Speilrein will never diminish, it's a genuinely affecting moment.

Like Cronengberg's other post-Spider films, A History of Violence and Eastern Promises, there's a rigorous realism to A Dangerous Method, but not necessarily a discordance with the director's other work. Going all the way back to Shivers, Cronenberg has long had a fascination with individuals who plunge headlong into perilous physical, psychological, and sexual realms. While his latest film is in many ways his most staid and accessible, there's an undeniable thrill in seeing some of his favored themes brought to the forefront and discussed openly by historical figures. Even in a film that consists mostly of jargon-laden conversations and letter-writing, Cronenberg still finds those moments that speak to his perennial fascination with body and machine. These include Spielrein's absent-minded fingering of her virginal bloodstain on a sheet; the pointed (yet restrained) presence of Freud's cigar, with its lengthening ash and damp, chewed end; and the tender way that the film lingers on Jung's wetting of his wife's hands before hooking her to a kind of Edwardian polygraph. Spielrein herself becomes a kind of vessel for the distinguishing “Cronenbergian” deformations of the flesh and mind, through both her grotesque physical contortions and her bizarre sexual confessions. Indeed, one of the film's creepiest moments involves Knightley's description of a wet, questing “mollusc” that she recalls visiting her in her sleep. Both Fassbender and Mortensen do suitable work with their relatively static roles, but the film really belongs to Knightley (and isn't that a suprise). Her madness-induced paroxysms early in the film are so over-the-top that they're almost laughable, but once Speilrein begins to emerge from her shell, Knightley truly shines. She does a stunning job of holding on to a remnant of Spielrein's queasy, unhinged quality, gradually tamping it down as the film's years roll on without ever obliterating it entirely. It's an astounding illusion to watch.