Film Festival 2008: Day 6
I saw my sister Ellen before Rain of the Children, because a bunch of people from her work were going; C came into town with me, but decided that discretion was the better part of valour as far as Vincent Ward films go, and went off shopping until Welcome to the Sticks.
While I totally understood C's trepidation, it was actually a really interesting documentary about the life of a Maori woman, Puhi, who he had made a documentary about (In Spring One Plants Alone) in 1978, near the beginning of his film-making career. But when he went back to investigate her life, and about her son, he ended up making a film showing a lot of aspects of life among the Tuhoe from around the turn of last century onwards, as well as some Maori attitudes towards mental health, the role of women, and how curses can travel down through the generations. This was a woman who had fourteen children, but had lost all but one - some to disease or hunger, but some to other people, who raised them as their own.
I sometimes found the recreations a bit hammy, there's something oddly stilted about Vincent Ward's delivery, and I felt... uncomfortable, I guess is the best word, about hearing the documentary maker putting words in the mouth of a dead woman, though Rena Owen did a fine job of delivering them. But it was a good movie, and I'm glad that I saw it.
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When I was watching Flight of the Red Balloon, it starts off with a scene directly referencing the original film, The Red Ballon; and when we finally saw the object, I thought to myself, "The balloon isn't as vibrantly red as in the original". And I think that it's fair to say that this was generally true: not that everything was less red, but that this a much more muted film. It had a lot of shots that felt like they went on for too long, and no real sense of resolution, and the life that we saw was a slice that didn't draw me in.
All the actors were good, especially the child actor; but I just wasn't interested in the film, which I really wanted to be. Not terrible, but not recommended.
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Then it was off to the Paramount Bergman theatre to watch Boy A, which is about a young man who had committed a terrible crime when he was a young boy, and his attempt at reintegration into society. In a way, it's a dark mirror to the movie In Bruges, in that it asks the same question about the possibility of redemption after an unforgivable act, but the answer it gives is much bleaker. I thought that it was well acted, and made me care about the people; but it had a certain inevitability to it that meant that I was never really tempted to hope, and so I kept my emotional distance.
Jenni mentioned that there was a point near the end of In Bruges where you could left, and it would have been a happy ending for everyone; I think the fact that everything pretty much goes well until near the end was why there wasn't any dramatic tension for me, since it was obvious what the shape of the movie was going to be. I'll admit to thinking about leaving the film before the bad stuff happened to the main character, though.
A well-made film, but I'd have no desire to rewatch it.
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And after all this bleakness and gloom, it was a nice change of pace to come to the Embassy and see a light French comedy. But before we got to that, there was the short Noise Control, an animation by the same people who did Pearl, Florrie and the Bull. This one was about the rooster in Kapiti who had been made the pet of a local kindergarten, and was shot by a noise control officer for crowing in the early hours of the morning; this made the international news because the kindergarten children found him dying in their sandpit the next day. However, it was also about the film-maker's son, who provided the voice for the rooster by being interviewed about his band and his music, and how they dealt with the neighbours when they practised in their suburban cul-de-sac.
Then it was on to Welcome to the Sticks, about a post-office manager so desperate to get a transfer to a plum position to please his wife that he ends up going too far, and being exiled to The North (I.e. to the north of Paris). His son is worried that he will lose toes from frostbite, and he and his wife are not much more optimistic. He goes on his own, and eventually finds that he quite likes it; but his wife falls in love with him again now that she's convinced herself that he's suffering nobly for his family. So when she decides that she can't let him suffer up there alone, he tries to get his new friends to give her an experience of the Dread North that confirms all her prejudices, so that his marriage will stay saved. There's also a romance sub-plot between two of his employees, with an awesome domineering mother as the main obstacle.
I really liked this film. It wasn't particularly challenging, or difficult, or innovative; but it was fun, and engaging, and warm. The translator appeared to do an excellent job of getting across the accent-based humour (which is pretty impressive, if you think about it). I think that a similar vein of humour could probably be mined by making a movie sending someone from Auckland down to the rural south, though the dialect jokes won't be as extensive - there's only so many times you can roll your "r"s...
I might well pick this one up on DVD.
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And then C went home, and I waited at the Embassy for my next movie, slightly hungry. This lead me to an unfortunate discovery - one of the times that you really notice when a film has long stretches of silence is when you're trying to eat an apple. (Also, when there's a band playing in the lounge bar behind you.) Lorna's Silence is about an Albanian woman who has married a Belgian junkie for citizenship; he believes that he'll be getting a payout when they're divorced, but she knows that the plan is to let him OD. Once she is a Belgian citizen and he's out of the picture, she will in turn marry a Russian man, implied to have criminal connections, to give him citizenship. She's got a boyfriend, and they plan to use their money to open up a café. Unfortunately, things start going wrong when the junkie decides to try to get clean; when she tells her boss, he reassures her that they'll just fake an overdose, and she starts to feel sorry for her faux husband, which in turn starts making her boss doubt her loyalty.
There was pretty much only one real surprise in this movie; otherwise, all the things that you'd expect to happen come to pass, and there's very little tension. Basically, this wasn't as good as I was hoping.
(A link back to the original post.)