Reviews

An awkward young girl picks up a camera and captures something extraordinary that stirs the imagination of many and stands in defiance of big budget film-making. Francis Ford Coppola envisioned this future event of cinema as counterpoint to his notoriously traumatic experience making 'Apocalypse Now'. In a strange twist of fate it would be his daughter, Sophia, who fulfills the prophecy. Her second film, 'Lost in Translation', was a note-perfect and affecting work filmed guerrilla-style on the streets of Tokyo. This set the benchmark high for Sophia and perhaps out of a desire to push herself to her creative limits she has since chose to follow-up this minimalist success with something from the other end of the spectrum altogether, a full-on costume drama (in the opulent setting of the Palace of Versailles no less), with her latest feature, 'Marie Antoinette'. The question arises whether she can repeat the success that materialized in her low-budget exercise on this grander scale? In more ways then one 'Marie Antoinette' feels like an act of hubris, an attempt by Sophia to tame the beast of big budget film-making with the lessons learned from her past guerrilla experience that never quite succeeds. Here the historical drama is reinvented, as post-modern flourishes are used to modernize historical events while still partially adhering to some procedural accuracy in the depiction of the court of King Louis XVI, the old and the new sitting side by side in a realm of the impossible made possible by our appreciation of the universal themes they explore. The story of Marie Antoinette is not nearly as interesting as the contemplation of excess that she symbolizes, and Sophia understands this as she gives two-thirds of the film over to the voyeuristic impulse of merely watching the empty riches of aristocracy like a fly on the wall undeterred by narrative constraints. The same convincing conversations that filled the Tokyo clubs in 'Lost in Translation' now fill the halls of Versailles, full of indifference to plot-point storytelling. This two-thirds of the film is a lyrical about-face to the genre, and unfortunately stands out as a blemish due to the remaining third of the film which goes on supposing the tone of historical drama. Perhaps as a feeble attempt to justify the budget and the stature of the subject matter, Sophia half-heartedly fills in the historical context of the story with weakly arranged tangents of drama which by their very presence diminish all that surrounds it, making what could have been a bold revision of our perception of history into a creaky history lesson with frills.

The fault I find with the film is not its radical departure from the genre but rather its lack of conviction. A better approach would have been to focus entirely on the trivial in the court of Versailles with little mention of the world outside of it, and follow this Austrian girl's trajectory into a world of great opulence that would titillate our own sense of materialism and draw us into the story and give us a place to contemplate our superficial tendencies. Certainly this was one motivation for the work, but it gets lost in half-measures, unsure of itself, and tries desperately to hold some vestige of historical biography into the narrative, but this hubris becomes amplified by the world of make-believe Sophia has fitted her story into; the historical talking-points sound like the misplaced voices of adults in the realm of a child's make-believe and have the same sort of nonsensical function.

Part of the problem is the casting, with the choice of comedic actors like Steve Coogan, Rip Torn, and Molly Shannon to play figures in the court of Versailles it becomes problematic when Sophie decides to shift gears and play the story as if it were historical drama when in fact it is pantomime. Similarly Kirsten Dunst and Jason Schwartzmann as the sovereigns Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI could only exist in a sort of hyper-reality fantasy that Sophie has concocted, and when she gives them historical talking-points without the knowing wink it shatters the illusion and forces us to think of the characters as caricatures of history rather than figures worthy of contemplation. Only Judy Davis seems to know her part in the pantomime and plays it up with relish, while everyone else struggles with the disjointed tone Sophia has set.

Despite the riches of visual delight in each frame of this film I was never entirely drawn into the story, I always felt outside of it looking in. The costumes, the music, the make-up, the setting, are of course immensely impressive and there is truly a cinematic vision at the heart of the work to rival any of the greats, however it lacks direction. I admire what Sophia tries to do, and I am deeply fond of her aesthetic tastes but I feel with this film she has made a serious misstep and the film sort of falls apart in the editing process, unsure of where it is supposed to go. Maybe there was some hesitation to follow through on the contemplative route due to the upped ante of filming at Versailles and the specter of big budget film-making. Maybe she lost her nerve. It is really unfortunate, because I do think Sophia represents something important in modern cinema, sort of what Tarrantino did in the nineties, a sort of indie cred that she earned with 'Lost in Translation'. There is something about her, her choice of music, her guerrilla ethos, I don't know, something about her films reminds me of the blogosphere, and the variety of grass root enterprises into art that it has spawned. Maybe I am just enamored with the myth of that awkward young girl picking up a camera and making great art.

Grade: C+ P.S. I am hoping it was just at my screening but I was wondering if anyone else noticed the film to be out of focus and slightly bluish throughout?

A stark wisp of a film, 'Day Night Day Night' was a last second addition to my festival-going experience, on this the last day of the festival. Each year I try to attend something I know very little about and this entry in the Visions program of the festival sparked my interest by its air of mystery: a story that for the first half of the film follows an unspecified woman spending what appears to be her last night on earth in a hotel room, followed by a tension-building second day on the streets of New York. The less you know about the story the better the experience. The actress who plays the central character, on screen every moment of the film, is mesmerizing as the somewhat clumsy yet fanatic young woman at a precarious crossroad in her life; much of the film is comprised of extreme close-ups of her face, the flaring nostrils and heavy breathing alerting us to the dark thoughts running through her mind. The audience is given very little back story of what brought her to this hotel room awaiting her fate, and the ambiguity pays off in the second half preventing the thrust of her mission from going down a well-trod path. This film could have easily stopped at a couple different junctures and been less successful as result, however the director keeps the story moving towards a surprisingly heart-wrenching moment that validates its whole purpose.

Grade: 8/10

Tonight was the world premiere of the documentary, 'The Killer Within', a film that was on my shortlist from the very beginning, largely because I have a philosophical soft spot for inquiries into guilt, a residual byproduct of my love for Dostoevsky. I expected this film to be reminiscent of Raskolnikov's odyssey into murder and redemption in 'Crime and Punishment' or of the killer who confesses to father Zosima in 'Brothers Karamazov'; a pensive study of a killer and the effect such a stigma has on a lifetime of behavior. For the most part, the film lived up to this expectation. In a not-so-direct way the documentary serves as a suitable companion piece to the novels of Dostoevsky, but it strays somewhat from his conclusions. The protagonist of the documentary, Bob Brechtel, is a blight to Dostoevsky's view that the interconnectedness of life is so fundamental that no man could kill without ethical ramifications on his/her conscience. Bob has killed and kept his secret from many people for fifty years, and remains stoically incapable of accepting full responsibility for his actions. A comment posed in the Q&A spoke of our want of definitive closure with respects to his redemption, something the film, and indeed Bob's life and those he affects, remain without.

It is not that Bob is unrepentant for what he did, but rather, his repentance is mired by his claim of mental illness, and this incomplete acknowledgement, captured in the documentary, sits uneasily with those closest to him. When attending Strathmore University in 1955, Bob killed another student in his sleep on what was intended to be a premeditated shooting spree in his dormitory. By his account, an act of temporary insanity was provoked by the bullying he endured from his fellow classmates. The director takes an even-handed look at both sides of argument as to Bob's innocence or guilt, leaving the audience with more questions than answers, in what turns out to be an immensely complex and engrossing study of one man's act of violence.

Presently, Bob is a well-loved family man and professor of psychology, who by his meek kind-hearted behavior seems the antithesis of a killer. Through an act of clemency by the victim's parents, he was not convicted for the crime but spent five years in a mental institution only to be released with a quiet reserve regarding the whole incident. His two daughters were at the premiere and spoke of their frustration with their father's inability to apologize to the living family member of the deceased. Throughout the documentary, Bob admits he is remorseful but a void of emotion remains in every statement he makes, his chilling composure even when confronted with the scenes of the crime fifty years later make one think this is more than a resigned acceptance, but perhaps a desperate coping mechanism keeping at bay a flood of emotion linked to the event. Despite the anti-climax of his responses throughout the film there is something even greater in this banality: Bob challenges the traditional concept of a sinning man in need of cleansing, perhaps against his best efforts, something he alludes to from time to time. His sins do not seem to eat away at him, nor have they been released from his confession to the world, no noticeable act of catharsis appears to have happened, no matter how desperately his family tries to incite it. Bob is an enigma whose chilling transgression of our (or some of our) ethical sensibilities leaves us struggling to comprehend the meaning of his actions, and by extension, the meaning of any act of violence if no universal moral standard applies.

With respects to the documentary itself, admittedly dwarfed by its subject, it still is a superbly crafted though quietly laid out production. There are ways this could have been exploitive and cheap, but the director, Macky Alston, was able to maintain some dignity to the families in his portrayal while opening the doors to conversation regarding the ethical ambiguity of the subject. Macky did hint that his hands were tied somewhat with respects to how far he could go with what he choose to show in the film, limited by the desires of both victimized families. However, what remains in the film is a depth of examination rarely given, where most of the principal individuals and places were available to be mined for the purposes of the story. Most incredible of all is the documented confessions by Bob to those people outside his immediate family and their direct reactions to the news.

Highly recommended.

Grade: 8/10