By no means are we winding down though.
As you can gather from the title, “closing night” is a bit of a misnomer in that there’s still two days of programming left afterwards. I’ve got a top 10 decently solidified by now but of course, there’s always room for some latebreaking entries. Last year it was The Settlers; this year the weekend mostly brings repeats and a couple retrospectives so we’ll have to see what happens.
In the past I’ve had to either stand in rush line or get tickets ahead of time for movies like Knives Out or All The Beauty And the Bloodshed (both great). Last year was the first time my badge let me into one, and it happened to be Saltburn (I don’t want to talk about it). A WWII drama about an evacuated mixed-race boy traveling back to London in search of his mother is usually not my thing, even helmed by the great Steve McQueen. Widows, Small Axe, 12 Years A Slave… Need I go on?
That said, I don’t know what all the reviews calling Blitz (Grade: A-) lesser or even anonymous are on about. Admittedly it does take a bit for the tone to even itself out; this is probably the lightest film McQueen has ever done, which is saying a lot for a movie that features a terrifying sequence of waterlines bursting in the London Underground. Some of the early child actors are too precocious, it’s at times didactic about everyone coming together, the score gets overbearing. And yet I cannot deny that it absolutely works for me. It’s as if someone took a Call The Midwife or similarly rah-rah British period piece and shot it through with the actual, terrible reality of the time. McQueen keeps pulling at the tension between the supposed solidarity of the war effort and the refusal of White Brits to stop being racist for 5 goddamn minutes, tempering the good time nostalgia with brutal reminders of the damage a bomb can do. Saoirse Ronan gets all glammed up and she works it, maybe not on the level of her best work, but absolutely a testament to her strengths as an actress. Perhaps it would’ve been served a little better if it was less sanitized for a PG-13. All I know is that McQueen should try doing a musical again, and I really need to watch the rest of Small Axe.
Blitz was the last centerpiece to play but it’s far from the last high profile film to play. One of those – for me at least – was Santosh (Grade: B+/A-), an Un Certain Regard competitor and the UK’s pick for Best International. Sandhya Suri’s feature debut follows the woman of the title, who takes her late husband’s job as a constable and ends up investigating the rape and murder of a young girl. I must admit there’s a few things going against me here: for one, I’m not at all familiar with India’s policing or justice system, so the concept of “women police” who either appear to handle things for other women or women related crimes went over my head. Additionally I did have to dip out to use the restroom, something I typically avoid doing even if I don’t miss much.
Maybe I also want to talk myself into liking it a bit more than I ended up. Suri zeroes in an the twin difficulties of the caste system (of which I’m familiar, but not completely) and being a woman in India. Santosh’s team up with an older woman investigator who’s more than a little dodgy also speaks to well-known corruption throughout Indian society, frequently centered around the police. As a procedural, it’s a tad lacking, though it does get tense. What sells it for me is the way sexism and misogyny lead compound on already present problems, exacerbated by a heavily stratified society getting more and more on edge. Overall, it’s an engrossing drama, and I can’t deny I enjoyed the look at the country from an actual Indian woman.
Part of the many reasons I love coming to Film Fest (and why I’m aching to travel to one of the bigger ones one day [please commission me]) is the discovery of a major new talent, someone I can obsess over that no one else may care about. This year has been a little lacking on that front; pretty much all the ones I’ve loved are movies I’d either heard about or from directors who are known quantities. Of the two other indies I saw today, The Knife (Grade: B/B+) lands somewhere along the lines of “wanted to love”. Conceptually it’s rather though-provoking: a Black man discovers a white woman has broken into his house, leading to an altercation that looks rather dire. Director Nnamdi Asomugha puts together a nice exercise in style and tension, despite leaning a bit on flashbacks in editing. His script with Mumblecore stalwart Mark Duplass is by no means egregious in twists or dialog, and Asomugha puts in a pretty credible performance along side Aja Noemi King, Melissa Leo, and Manny Jacinto. It’s ultimately less than the sum of its parts, perhaps better as a short or proof of concept but at least a decent calling card for a burgeoning filmmaker and actor.
Speaking of proof of concept, the director of the next film said in a Q&A after that it actually started as a short which made its way to Joel Coen, who encouraged its production. Call that serendipity or whatever since Sew Torn (Grade: B+/A-) on paper sounds like such a riff on No Country For Old Men as to bring disaster. You never want someone to be thinking of the much better thing they could be watching instead. Turns out a drug deal gone bad and stolen money is practically the only thing similar to the Coen’s masterpiece. Freddy MacDonald – co-writing with his dad Fred – has actually crafted something on the level of Greener Grass or Survival Skills, aka a series of sketches that don’t seem to take place anywhere near reality.
I was in love with it from the moment I saw the painfully European car with a giant needle-and-thread on the back of it. That car belongs to Barbara (Eve Connolly), a seamstress in a storybook-like Swiss town. She’s mourning her mother, in the process of losing her shop – home to fanciful Talking Portraits made of thread – when a dash to service a client finds her smack in the middle of the aforementioned drug deal. From here, MacDonald crafts a Run Lola Run style choice-narrative: Take Money, Call Police, Drive Away. Each chapter features inventive MacGuyvering of string and thread, some funny bits surrounding townspeople and side-characters, and the Coens’ pet theme of “crime is really, really, hard you guys”. The toyetic feel and quirky town would suggest Wes Anderson, but MacDonald lacks his precision of tone and voice. It doesn’t feel as populated as other low budget stunners like Riddle of Fire, though Connolly has a presence that reminded me of a less crazed Vic Michaelis.
All of which is to say I wanted more of what MacDonald was selling. He strikes such a unique tone with such inspired thread-based setpieces. I laughed quite a bit and had a pretty good time, and if it doesn’t reach the heights of my other beloved discoveries, he should at least take solace in scraping such rarified company. I’m so glad I managed to make time for it, and that’s enough.
Tomorrow: The director of The Act of Killing and The Look Of Silence unleashes his long gestating musical, and I get a double dose of Tilda when I finally get to the latest AlmodĂłvar.
Life of the Mind 