SLIFF 2011: Shuffle

2011 // USA // Kurt Kuenne // November 20, 2011 // Theatrical Blu-ray (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

The core narrative conceit of Shuffle is inventive, but nonetheless disposed to invite comparisons to other works: Quantum Leap, Jacob’s Ladder, Dark City, A Christmas Carol, Twelve Monkeys, Memento, and, most crucially, It’s a Wonderful Life. The film’s aesthetic and tone, meanwhile, are presented with an affectionate nod to the original Twilight Zone series. Writer, composer, and director Kurt Kuenne has submitted, for the viewer’s approval, one Lovell Milo (T.J. Thyne), a man who is living his life out of sequence. Each morning he awakens to a day plucked seemingly randomly from the catalog of his experiences. These days gradually reveal a life riddled with dissatisfaction and heartbreak, from his stymied ambitions to become an art photographer to his tragic romance with the girl next door, Grace (the marvelously pixie-voiced Paula Rhodes). The vaguely amnesiac Lovell cannot recall exactly when this temporal scrambling first began, although (with a little prodding) he eventually begins paying close attention to everything he sees and hears, in the hopes of unraveling his private, jumbled Hell. Gradually, patterns begin to emerge within the chronological chaos, as clusters of significant event appear around particular ages (8, 26, and 30) and the pivotal role of Lovell’s domineering father (Chris Stone) becomes increasingly clear.

Shuffle’s narrative gimmickry and deep pedigree in genre filmmaking would seem to place it far afield from Kuenne’s previous feature-length effort, the raw and unnervingly personal documentary Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father. Both films, however, advocate acceptance and fortitude in the face of the cosmos’ fundamental unfairness, and both lionize the principle that the Greek philosophers termed eudaemonia, a balanced existence of virtue and happiness. Shuffle’s novel structure and recurring playing card motif both underline the entangled character of chance and control in the human experience. The film poses that, like a game of poker, life's outcomes are partly out of our hands and partly dependent on our choices. However, the simple-mindedness of the underlying story and the abundant heart-tugging melodrama suggest that the film doesn’t have particularly cerebral ambitions. Shuffle’s affinity for gooey sentimentality often grows grating, appearing as it does without Capra’s often-overlooked dark edge. Similarly, the film’s reliance on theistic mumbo-jumbo for its twists lends a hollow, desperate note to what is otherwise an earnest tale of personal liberation.

SLIFF 2011: The White Meadows

2009 // Iran // Mohammad Rasoulof // November 19, 2011 // Theatrical DVD (Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema)

Arid outlandishness rules in The White Meadows, a dream-like Iranian fairy tale that offers a procession of striking visuals that prove stubbornly resistant to allegorical readings. The film evokes the surrealism of Alejandro Jodorowsky at every turn. Like that director's acid Western masterpiece El Topo, every bizarre detail in The White Meadows seems pregnant with meaning. The fact that the film is ultimately cryptic—at least to this Western viewer—does not detract from its beguiling spell.

Rahmat (Hasan Pourshirazi) rows his boat across a glassy sea, visiting a succession of strange, salt-encrusted islands. At each one, he collects tears from the local inhabitants, carefully bottling them for some inscrutable purpose. In a manner that necessarily recalls The Odyssey, each stop highlights fresh wonders and odd customs: a virgin bride set adrift on a raft as a sacrifice to the sea; a trained monkey whose daily antics allow onlookers to literally set aside their cares; islanders whispering their secrets into jars, which a dwarf must then deliver to a fairy at the bottom of a village well. At one island, a boy (Younes Ghazali) manages to stow away on Rahmat's boat, and is thereafter treated as something like a slave, son, and successor.

The style of the film is firmly in the realm of magical realism, although nothing that one could describe as definitively fantastical actually occurs onscreen. The White Meadows seems to exist in a timeless, metaphor-laden Purgatory, one cobbled together from folk-tale tropes and the melancholy whimsy of Terry Gilliam. For Western viewers, hints of Arthurian myth and Giorgio de Chirico's paintings seem to flicker at the edges of the film's Persian trappings, in a testament to the universal character of its potent imagery and scenarios.

Some scenes seem to be critical of authoritarian power's hostility to dissent and free expression, such as a sequence where islanders terrorize an artist who refuses to depict the sea in its natural blue color. In the main, however, the film's pleasures stem not from cutting political or social insight, but from its humane sorrow, its daubs of sly humor, and its persuasive aura of unhurried strangeness.

SLIFF 2011: Jeff, Who Lives at Home

2011 // USA //Jay and Mark Duplass // November 18, 2011 //Digital Theatrical Projection (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

If it achieves nothing else, Jeff, Who Lives at Home definitely demonstrates that writer-directors Jay and Mark Duplass, rascal-princes of the Mumblecore scene, are capable of subsuming that cinematic movement's distinctive aesthetic (anti-aesthetic, really) and acidic comic sensibility in the service of a star-powered, warm-and-fuzzy indie dramedy. To label Jeff a slick piece of soulless hackwork goes a bit too far, and doesn't reflect the gentle, earnest character of the film's sentimentality. It's mostly inoffensive and thoroughly mild, a rote exercise in cinematic cliché with unfortunate ambitions of profundity.

The titular Jeff (Jason Segel) is a thirtysomething unemployed schlub dwelling in his widowed mother's basement in Baton Rouge, where he passes the time with bong hits and repeated viewings of the M. Night Shyamalan film Signs. The latter has nursed within Jeff a distressing obsession with omens and destiny, and ultimately provides the kick-start for a kind of Long Day of the Soul. This odyssey has him crossing paths with his asshole brother Pat (Ed Helms), who enlists Jeff in a scheme to spy on his deeply (and justifiably) dissatisfied wife, Linda (Judy Greer). There is also a subplot about the brothers' exasperated mother Sharon (Susan Sarandon), who is attempting to unmask a secret admirer at her workplace. (This strand is both wholly superfluous and also the most engaging and authentically sweet aspect of the film, primarily due to Sarandon's masterful ability to elevate absolutely anything she appears in.)

The film's slightly arch references to Shyamalan (including the casting of The Village alum Greer) signal that Jeff is aiming to conclude with a climactic twist, or at least of panoply of head-scratching coincidences. The film might be merely pleasant and forgettable, were it content with being a goofy dramedy about curdled family bonds and thwarted dreams. Yet Jeff has an irksome investment in Depak Chopra-tinted bromides about purposeful messages from the cosmos, even as it conveys such pablum with an ironic smirk. Jeff seems to assert that winking while delivering vacuous New Age stoner wisdom absolves it of the sin of ridiculousness. Instead, it just adds a dose of obnoxiousness.

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.