BFI LFF 2010: It’s Kind of a Funny Story / Submarine
Regular readers will roll their eyes as I once again make note of my long-standing antipathy towards the coming-of-age genre, which often strikes me as a lazy excuse for writer/directors to throw a patronising sequence of crowd-pleasing cliches together and call it a day. Most cinematic teenagers are as horribly boring as I was at that age, and no amount of comical lasciviousness, bad luck, and antagonistic authority figures are going to make that journey from innocence to worldliness any more interesting or relevant than the million others who have graced our screens. People may complain about The Breakfast Club or Ferris Bueller’s Day Off for treating trivial teen anguish as if it was the end of the world, but at least John Hughes came up with some ways to make this pubescent angst wry enough for older viewers while treating adolescent worries with the same gravitas as those teens do. There are a few great coming-of-age movies that mean a whole lot to me, and are made with love by talented people, but they’re in the minority as far as I’m concerned. Most other movies about kids are just chaff: wank fantasies for self-absorbed, creatively-blocked phonies who know they don’t have to expend any real energy to generate a response in the viewer. There is not enough ill-tempered disdain in my body to properly convey my annoyance with the genre.
Perhaps Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s It’s Kind Of A Funny Story was doomed to fall foul of my ire, but even beyond my prejudices it is a shoddy movie, the kind of Sundance-audience-pandering tripe that personifies the worst of the US independent scene with an extra dose of insensitivity thanks to its romanticised view of mental illness. The tragedy is that in the midst of the rubble stands Zach Galafianakis, whose charismatic and thoughtful performance is entirely at odds with the depressing obviousness of Fleck and Boden’s storytelling. His presence is the one thing preventing this ingratiating failure from being consigned to the nearest memory hole.
IKoaFS concerns Craig (Keir Gilchrist), a teenager feeling overwhelmed by the pressures of his life and in love with the unobtainable hot girl, who checks himself into a psychiatric hospital after his suicidal feelings threaten to take over. Through a series of ridiculous contrivances he is admitted and made to stay in the adult wing of the hospital, meaning he is forced to interact with all kinds of charming and kooky patients whose wisdom and insight allow Craig to blossom and come out of his shell, as well as get the even hotter hot girl (Emma Roberts) who is in there because of some issues with self-harm but IT’S OKAY FOLKS it’s not too bad she cheers up thanks to her nerdy new boyfriend DON’T LET THE SCARS GET YOU DOWN!
Disclaimer: Though I liked Ryan Fleck’s work on In Treatment, his much-vaunted drug-PSA Half Nelson left me cold, despite a trio of exceptional performances. The main character’s arc — from teacher to drug addict living a depraved life in a tidy crack house — rang entirely false, the kind of cautionary tale written by someone whose most shocking experience with drugs is a few tokes on a spliff at college and too much ‘tussin that one time. It felt like a high-school drama production, extrapolating a situation out from knowledge learned third-hand, and therefore filled with unconvincing notes. At least it had terrific work from Ryan Gosling, Anthony Mackie and Shareeka Epps: IkoaFS wastes Lauren Graham, Jim Gaffigan, Viola Davis, Jeremy Davies (a Solaris reunion!) and especially Galafianakis, who deserves any of the awards I suspect he will win even if that success somehow validates the rest of the movie.
Not that most people will notice: Fleck/Boden do everything short of draw a bath for the audience to get them to like their movie. It’s based on a YA novel and so it’s likely a lot of the sharp edges of such a situation were absent from the source material (I haven’t read it, so I accept I could be wrong), but even so there is nothing daring or troubling or real here, just a fantasy where mental illness is just a way of looking at the world with fresh eyes, teenage pain is easily resolved with a kiss from the right person (and not that “slutty” girl he thought he loved because eww, right?), and anything really dark happens offscreen. For example, the ultimate fate of Galafianakis’ character Bobby is hinted at strongly but isn’t shown, because who wants to harsh the audience’s mellow? It’s the most craven directorial decision of the year, an insult to anyone who suffers from real mental illness, or who knows someone suffering. Yes, it’s commendable for anyone to point out that while mental illness is debilitating it is also not something to be scared of, and rehabilitation is possible with the correct care. However, nothing in IKofFS leads me to believe the choices made here were in order to illuminate the plight of mentally-ill people. They’re just kooky and a bit down, right? Yay fun times in the psych ward! I had to leave the screening as the credits rolled for fear of marring the subsequent Q&A with some choice words for Fleck.
The poor choices made here are legion. Beyond the “One Flew Over Sesame Street” tone of genial eccentricity, the wall-to-wall contrivance and the insulting lack of respect for the audience, the lowpoint of the movie is probably the Under Pressure karaoke scene, in which our hero is hectored by his fellow mental patients to participate in musical therapy, singing the lead vocal to Under Pressure by Queen and David Bowie while the rest of the patients enthusiastically play out of tune around him. Rather than show the haphazard rendition, Fleck/Boden switches the soundtrack to the original recording and concocts a kitsch fantasia, a stage on which the characters cavort in Glam Rock gear, miming to an obnoxiously edited version of the song. Even worse, when it’s over he cuts back to the hospital and the ecstatic reaction of the patients to Craig’s vocal effort, which we didn’t get to see. It’s an act of sheer directorial cowardice to switch to a “dream sequence” at that moment – plus we don’t really get to experience Craig’s moment of catharsis – but it didn’t matter. The audience we saw it with were utterly delighted and responded with sheer joy. Job done, I suppose. ::kicks Rock Band microphone across the room::
But hey, what do you care, dear reader? I hate coming-of-age movies so I’m biased, right? Think on this: Richard Ayoade’s directorial debut, Submarine, is another coming-of-age movie where the protagonist pines for the hot girl and is overwhelmed by the stresses of adolescence, but is on the opposite end of the awesomeness-bogusness spectrum. Whereas Fleck/Boden’s bland fantasy mollycoddles the audience with empty emotion-calories, Ayoade’s adaptation of Joe Dunthorne’s novel is spiky, unpredictable, and willing to test the audience’s sympathy for its characters. Also, Fleck/Boden’s washed-out and flat visuals don’t stand a chance next to Ayoade’s vibrant visual style, a mixture of retro and modern film styles that display an intuitive understanding of cinema. Fleck/Boden’s nearest visual comparison point is Grey’s Anatomy, except less adventurous, while Ayoade is comfortable throwing in a pitch-perfect reference to The 400 Blows as if it ain’t no thing. Game, set and match.
That makes it sound as if Submarine is some self-conscious exercise in film-school masturbation, but nothing could be further from the truth. It’s a vibrant and lovable debut, thoroughly entertaining yet slightly troubling. Perhaps that’s a subjective response: the tale of pretentious teen Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts) and his love for Jordana Bevan (Yasmin Paige) chimed uncomfortably with memories of my own teenage years. Not to say I went through anything too similar: I didn’t have to watch as my parents flirted with the idea of divorce, and I certainly didn’t have an enemy as eccentric as Paddy Considine’s psychic charlatan Graham Purvis, but Ayoade’s feel for the era is spot on, as is his ability to portray the gulf between a teenager’s arrogant assumption that he or she knows best and the reality of his or her obliviousness to the complicated nature of the world.
His superb cast helps. Roberts and Paige are wonderful as the confused teenage couple, deftly handling the light and dark moments of a fraught relationship while not being afraid to be realistically unlikeable at times. Jordana in particular can be a real monster, but Oliver does awful things too, often for recognisably human reasons. Despite this I couldn’t help but root for them both to stay the course: I can’t remember the last time I felt so emotionally invested in an onscreen relationship, though again this could have been a subjective reaction stirred by Ayoade’s perfectly judged recreation of this youthful mind-set.
Or maybe it was his ability to capture powerful moments of ecstatic, innocent happiness. It’s Kind of a Funny Story featured obligatory scenes of teenagers running through the halls of a mental institution to denote their love and exuberance: a visual that didn’t really work as the cramped, pastel-coloured halls convey anything like joy, though they’re also not depressing enough to act as some kind of satirical counterpoint. Following the conventions of the genre, Ayoade has to give us the “Joy Run” as well, but his version plucked my heart from my chest and bounced it around like a basketball. It’s a Super-8 film of the young couple racing through an abandoned funfair, setting off fireworks and lighting their way with flares. It’s a show-stopping moment, one that made me ache for my younger days: an emotion I rarely feel.
Warp Films are on a roll this year. They produced Shane Meadows’ This is England ‘ 81 for Channel Four, as well as Chris Morris’ excellent Four Lions, and now they’ve generously set Ayoade on the road to directorial stardom. I happily admit much of my emotional reaction to Submarine was due to that very specific emotional response – a strange tightening in my chest, half angst and half glee, borne of recognition – that might not happen for anyone else. Still, Ayoade deserves praise for adding such sour and realistic notes to what otherwise could have been an exercise in stylised nostalgic frippery. Combine that with his unique visual style, his facility with young actors, and some superb musical choices, and it’s probable Submarine will appeal to more than just the odd blogger who was extremely pretentious in his youth. I’m even tempted to name it my favourite British film of the year so far. Despite all of that competition, obviously. [/sarcasm tag to denote sarcasm]
BFI LFF 2010: Never Let Me Go / Archipelago / 13 Assassins
Never Let Me Go achieves something almost unique: it’s a movie whose artistic achievement arguably dooms it. Directed by Mark Romanek and adapted from Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel by Alex Garland, the movie depicts an alternate timeline in which organ donation technology was perfected in England in the 1950s. In order to provide organs for harvesting, donors are bred and raised in schools, where they are prepared for a short, perfunctory shadow of a normal life and an inevitably protracted and grisly death. This process is shown through the eyes of Kathy (Carey Mulligan, on fire as usual), a donor whose love for Tommy (Andrew Garfield: even better here than in Social Network) is thwarted by the machinations of Ruth (Keira Knightley), a betrayal which Kathy stoically endures for several years before their unavoidable fate brings them back together for a reckoning.
Writing it out like that makes it seem as if the movie is a melodramatic and emotional rollercoaster, but Romanek – whose first movie, way back in the 80s, was the similarly clinical Static – has been given the unenviable task of dramatising the tale of three people whose emotional spectrum is compromised to the point of frigidity, and whose range of action is necessarily restricted. A snap decision by Kathy midway through the movie to become a “carer” is possibly the only action in the movie that passes for agency: even Tommy’s insistence that he can convince his former teachers of the existence of his soul through the use of art is presented as an almost indifferent act, though this could be a side-effect of the demands placed on the actors.
Dissecting the movie afterwards shines a light on Romanek and Garland’s choices, and it’s apparent that the mysterious nature of the donors is intentional. There is no explanation of the logistical and medical processes behind the programme (are they clones or test tube babies?), and as we experience this alternate world through the eyes of three people whose knowledge of their predicament is incomplete it makes sense to keep us in the dark as well. Nevertheless, if we’re meant to empathise with these people, it doesn’t help that the audience has to expend so much energy attempting to ignore all of the questions thrown up by the scenario. One particularly egregious act change happens abruptly, with the events of the next few years – events that radically change the relationships of the three “protagonists” – are brushed away with a quick burst of expositionary voiceover. Choices like that make the movie so slippery it’s hard to hold on to it, or to connect.
As time has passed since seeing it, I’ve come to appreciate many of the narrative decisions made here, while being resigned to not really caring about the finished product much. I wish I’d read Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel just to know how many of Romanek and Garland’s choices were out of loyalty to the author or were experiments that went awry. There’s so much to commend about the movie, especially the breath-taking performances from Andrew Garfield and Carey Mulligan, both of whom are good enough that I will happily recommend the movie just for them alone. It’s thought-provoking, beautifully shot and sensitively scored, but in dramatising the emptiness of these “people” and leaving out so much backstory, the experience rings frustratingly hollow. It really doesn’t help that after two hours of commendably/annoyingly spare storytelling, the final scene of the film features a little voiceover speech that explicitly spells out one of the major themes of the movie. Imagine if The Godfather ended with a voiceover from Michael Corleone saying, “As the door shut on my wife Kay, it occurred to me that the terrible choices I had made and the events that led to me becoming the head of a crime family have estranged me from the woman I loved and corrupted my soul.” It’s that bad.
The single strongest emotion I experienced while watching it was horrible futile anger at the society that had created these people and asked them to live an empty life before being butchered for the sake of others, especially as the donors accept their fate with such glum resignation. As others have commented, this makes the story a companion to Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day, in which James Stevens refuses to leave the societal box he was born into even though this prevents him from finding true happiness. Britons certainly love their immobile class strata, or rather Britons resent it terribly but don’t seem to have a problem watching people “beneath” them trapped in their amber of their upbringing. On that level Never Let Me Go is almost a success: it pushed that class-conscious button in my soul about as hard as it ever has, and American director Romanek deserves recognition for capturing the frozen nature of British society — and the miserable country-wide decision to treat it as an immutable fact — so well.
Regrettably, the necessary narrative gap that keeps us from understanding the true predicament of the protagonists also makes it hard to equate with them. Are they accepting of their fate because of some hardwired conditioning? Because they have been taught to be this way? Is there something missing from their chemistry as a result of the process that created them? How much of this story is directly related to the ways in which societal strata are enforced by the education and culture in the real world? If it’s a biological amendment to people who would have developed to be humans with agency, is this an allegory for something else? The technical details of this world shouldn’t really matter, and I’m not so anal that I can’t make a few leaps of assumption, but knowing the exact purpose of the movie is inevitably stymied by the vagueness of the rules.
That means Never Let Me Go succeeds at least partially as brain food, but the sad side-effect is that it’s even harder to make an emotional connection with the often affectless characters. I can praise it as a satire on the British class system (scenes depicting working class people so overwhelmed with pity that they are unable to even look at the donors are probably the only ones that stayed with me when the movie ended), and maybe even fondly consider it some form of weirdly clinical agit-prop designed to subconsciously drive the viewer into a rebellion against the prison of their social standing, but no matter how hard I try I can’t see it as a tragic love story or fable about the fleeting nature of life itself, despite the considerable efforts of the main actors and the focus of much of the narrative. It’s a movie to admire rather than feel, though the sound of sniffing in the auditorium suggests I may be alone on this one. Is it wrong that I wanted to watch Michael Bay’s The Island as soon as I left the screening? (Please don’t answer that one.)
Strangely, the cold tone of Joanna Hogg’s Archipelago didn’t bother me at all, but then the suppressed emotional charge of her movie wasn’t at odds with the theme, as with Romanek’s film. Her second movie (the first, Unrelated, came and went so fast it only left two or three positive reviews in its wake) depicts a family getaway to the isle of Tresco that goes awry. Actually, that is probably the wrong way of looking at it. This family, comprising Edward (Tom Hiddlestone, soon to be Loki in Branagh’s Thor), Cynthia (the wonderfully unpleasant Lydia Leonard), their mother Patricia (Kate Fahy), and their absent father, is already horribly broken at the start of the holiday, and over the course of the movie they pretty much just decide to stop pretending that everything is all right. It’s the slowest of slow burns: almost nothing happens for the running time, but those little chinks in their armour, those very British stiff-upper-lip pretences, are revealed in mesmerising detail, all while the incredible scenery is battered by metaphorical tumult.
It should be exactly the sort of thing that repels me, but Hogg’s control of tone and pace is impressive, and her ability to draw convincing and naturalistic dialogue and performances from her actors is second-to-none: how gratifying to see someone picking at upper-middle-class mores and concerns with such respect and restraint, while critics are compelled to mistakenly gush praise at Mike “Snide” Leigh and his reliance on caricature and mockery. Hogg is perfectly happy dragging scenes out to almost unendurable length, the uncomfortable silences stretching out to the point that I almost ran out of the cinema to avoid them (my inability to handle such uncomfortable moments is most horribly displayed in my eagerness to ask questions at film festival Q&As. When no one seemed to want to ask Shirley Henderson a question after the screening of Meek’s Cutoff I almost rugby-tackled the guy with the microphone just to end that excruciating moment).
Just to make Archipelago even more British, Hogg adds two extra characters: a pretentious painter (the oleaginous Christopher Baker) who hovers around Patricia as her loneliness grows, while giving amusingly vague advice to Edward, and Rose (Amy Lloyd), the cook who accompanies them all, attracting the listless romantic attentions of Edward and some withering class-borne disdain from Cynthia. It’s arguable that both of them are there as temptations for Patricia and Edward, but Rose’s most important role is as counter-point to the silly concerns of the family. While they squabble about Edward’s decision to take a gap year break in Africa to battle AIDS, and pine for their absent and uncaring father, Rose is forced to travel to Tresco from far away in search of employment, and is still mourning the unexpected death of her father.
Not that anyone cares: even Edward is only interested in her as a distraction from his worries. At least he’s civil to her: Cynthia really shines in the moments when she interacts with Rose, treating her as the help, a viewpoint that initially seems uncaring and mean but eventually presents itself as arguably correct. As with Never Let Me Go, the proles know their place and accept it. Social mobility is fine as something to aspire to, but in the moment, it’s best to ignore it. Cynthia and Patricia’s treatment of Rose is cruel, but it rings with uncomfortable truth. Of course, that’s not to say that Cynthia is in the right: she spends much of the film sucking the joy out of rooms in much the same way as Anne Hathaway’s Kym from Rachel Getting Married. The best scene in the movie sees the five characters visiting a local restaurant for a mid-afternoon meal, during which Cynthia’s behaviour tips over into obnoxious tyranny, her impatience with the trip and her companions mutating into boorish behaviour. Hogg is only ever going to give us hints as to why she is behaving the way she does, but it’s enough to realise she is suppressing terrible emotional pain and acting out like a spoiled brat. The British audience visibly shrank and moaned throughout: I chewed my knuckles in anxious horror.
As Daisyhellcakes pointed out afterwards, the whole movie plays out like the Eddie Izzard routine about British movies (the first minute of this clip), but it is also genuinely insightful. As with Never Let Me Go there is no real emotional connection to be had with the characters: they’re all quite ridiculous, and we never really get to experience their emotional state in a raw way. It’s telling that both movies hide the few scenes of emotional expression: Tommy’s howl of agony is almost drowned out by the diagetic and non-diagetic soundtrack, and the outbursts of Patricia and Cynthia in Archipelago occur off-screen and are recorded by mics that reduce their words to barely recognisable gibberish. We’re British, you see. We don’t do that kind of thing. What makes Archipelago a success is that it holds its focus on this gap between inner and outer life, never needing to rely on a voiceover a la Never Let Me Go to reveal the desires of its characters. Those desires are unimportant: it’s their suppression that is key. Hogg’s skill at skewering that conflict in the British psyche is admirable: let’s hope she soon gets the following she rightly deserves.
Both movies captured the dreadful emotional stasis caused when you know your place and feel you have no choice to accept it, though neither of them were interested in expressing the pain one feels at this situation in anything other than an oblique way. Not so Takashi Miike’s mind-boggling 13 Assassins, which would’ve been my favourite movie at the festival if I hadn’t had my brain stabbed to happy death by Black Swan. Nevertheless it was a close call: Miike’s incredible achievement is essential viewing for anyone who has ever enjoyed an action movie, mostly because it isn’t a winking joke. It could have been the samurai version of Peter Jackson’s Brain Dead (no disrespect to that balls-out classic), but thankfully we get a serious-minded tale of the end of an era, as the feudal system of 19th Century Japan leads to ossification, corruption and madness.
The rigid laws – both implicit and explicit – of the Shogunate system have allowed an intolerable situation to develop: the utterly demented Lord Narigatsu Matsudaira (Gorô Inagaki) is terrorising the land and considering bringing war back to peaceful Japan. His actions — which include using a family as target practice, and the brutal maiming of a woman he then turns into a slave for his amusement — are truly deplorable, but his relation to the Shogun means no one can directly act against him without bringing great shame upon themselves. All that is left is futile gesture: the movie begins with one court member committing seppuku in protest. It’s an act of dishonour that forces his compatriots to hatch a plan: to convince one honorable man to bear that dishonour, and find a way to stop the evil lord.
Shinzaemon Shimada (a thrilling performance from Kôji Yakusho) is a lower-tier samurai, deemed expendable by those in power, but shrewd enough to grasp that while his act will be a suicidal one, it will be honorable in a way that is not formally recognised by Japanese society. Courtiers and heads of important families take turns attempting to persuade Shinzaemon to betray his loyalty to the Shogun by revealing Narigatsu’s evil deeds, his murder and rape and disfigurement of those around him, actions borne of madness and boredom. Disgusted to the point of fury, Shinzaemon forms a group of samurai and ronin who understand the importance of the insurrection, and a trap is created to dispose of Narigatsu. The main obstacle in his plan is the Lord’s protector, Hanbei Kitou (Masachika Ichimura), a former friend of our hero who is more wedded to the concept of respect for the Shogun, to the point that he is willing to defend the odious lord even at the cost of his life.
That’s the first hour of the movie: a stately and reflective series of negotiations that get to the heart of this society and the contradictions therein. The order of the Shogunate system is strong enough to bring about a period of peace in Japan, but so rigid that there is no way to correct difficulties without dooming oneself. Shinzaemon and his band of warriors are willing to break that rule of law, but the cost might not just be their lives: the samurai code could die with them, bringing about the end of the tradition, and the collapse of Japan’s feudal system. Another hour depicting that quandary would have been amazing too: Miike does an incredible job of exploring the nature of this ideological conflict. Nevertheless, what follows is on another level altogether: a 45-minute sequence set in a town that has been transformed into a deadly trap, as Shinzaemon and his 12 assassins face off against over 200 enemies in a protracted battle that is staged with the precision of a master and the energy of a maniac. Miike truly delivers, and then some.
Livestock burns, buildings and people explode, a river runs red with blood, and mutilated bodies pile up, while the battle progresses from orderly precision to chaotic skirmish through to madness. The final moments of the battle are terrifying, with characters succumbing to exhaustion and insanity before the final showdown between the best of the old order and the corrupted offspring that jeopardises everything. It’s a bravura setpiece the likes of which I’ve never seen: an attempt to find the original version by Eiichi Kudo has failed, and so I have no idea how long the final battle in that lasts. Here it is lengthy, but paced so the ebb and flow of action feels like structure. It’s a movie in itself, almost, and left me reeling in my seat and suppressing the urge to cheer throughout — one powerful moment that shows Shinzaemon unfurling a scroll nearly made my brain combust with joy (you’ll understand when you see it). For that, and for numerous other ridiculously exciting moments, 13 Assassins is officially the Acme of Badass Cinema.
The only problem I have with it is a choice in the final moments of the film, which I won’t spoil here. I’m not really sure what Miike was trying to do with the last conversation, other than to note the passing of the feudal era and the Way of the Samurai, but his method of doing so was out of odds with every other perfectly-judged choice. Still, it’s not enough to ruin what is a remarkable achievement. It is truly the thinking person’s action movie, a flawlessly constructed band-of-warriors movie that rightly crushes Stallone’s incoherent and lazy Expendables into the dirt, and stands as the best samurai film since Yôji Yamada’s The Twilight Samurai. Whenever it comes out near you, do everything you can to ensure you see it.
BFI LFF 2010 – Self Made / Tabloid
2009 was the first year I attended the London Film Festival — despite having lived in the capital for ten years – and the experience was so enjoyable the concentrated cinematic download instantly became my new secular Christmas. 2010 has been a less than ideal year for many reasons, the most trivial of which being the disappointing summer season, which has traditionally been a highpoint for me. This year the sting was removed: knowing I would be seeing far superior (and, as it turned out, inferior) movies in the first few weeks of October made the torment of enduring Resident Evil: Afterlife 3D almost bearable.
I won’t lie: part of it is the glamour — or should I say “glamour” – of seeing and/or meeting filmmakers and celebrities, though the resolutely dismal setting does tend to make the experience a lot more humble. It’s one thing to see tiny Michelle Williams in the flesh – a vision of indie-movie chic in her Erdem dress at the first screening of Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine – and another to cringe at the thought of her forced to eschew the comfort of the West End Vue cinema lobby due to a torrent of water pouring from a burst pipe in the ceiling, and thus ending up posing in a cramped alley outside, the sound of the paparazzi cameras drowned out by the noise of renovation work on the knackered old building next door. If she had ever wondered what the diametric opposite of La Croisette was, now she knows. (Imagine this alley half obstructed with bright blue panels.)
Nevertheless, for an amateur blogger / professional starfucker who has yet to be jaded by encounters with the creative people I admire, there is still a frisson of delight when your experience of watching a movie is enhanced by a quick introduction by Darren Aronofsky and an appearance by Mila Kunis and the impossibly cool Vincent Cassel, though I’m sure my enjoyment of Black Swan was down to the quality of the film (spoiler alert: it’s phenomenal). As I intend to make attendance of the LFF an annual thing (as long as I’m living in the UK, of course), I’m sure the novelty will wear off, but for now, please forgive me if I get annoyingly breathless recounting these little moments.
Luckily the festival started promisingly with Gillian Wearing’s debut movie Self Made, an almost uncategorisable experimental piece in which seven volunteers participate in a method-acting workshop that takes on a therapeutic aspect. Judging from comments made by acting coach Sam Rumbelow after the screening, there was never the intention of providing therapeutic help to the participants as learning the Method is not meant to double as therapy, but it seems to have been an inevitable by-product of the project, especially as Wearing selected the seven volunteers on the basis of the life stories they had described to her when applying to take part. As the film progresses we get an insight into the histories of these people, see what has shaped them. Uncomfortable truths are exposed, traumatic experiences unearthed, and in some cases a kind of catharsis is reached by addressing these psychic wounds via role-playing, method-acting exercises, and performances in small filmed scenes that force the participants to face the problems that are causing them so much pain.
It’s a description that makes the movie sound dry, but Wearing is more of a showman than you might think. She consciously plays with the audience’s expectations, melding the reality of the participant’s lives with the fictitious acting challenges, casting her subjects in “roles” that play with what we have previously discovered about them. She even manages to throw in one of the best shock-jump moments I’ve seen in years, superior to anything in Paranormal Activity 2 – a perversely funny directorial decision she can be proud of. She is also unafraid to show some almost unbearable scenes of revelation: scenes featuring participant Ash Akhtar are so raw it’s hard to watch. (Disclaimer: I know Ash via Twitter – and now real life – so it was always going to be tough to see him in such a vulnerable state, but I doubt that anyone watching the film will fail to be moved by his devastating scenes.)
It’s been said before that fiction gets closer to the truth of things than non-fiction, and Self Made shows Wearing playing with that idea. It’s possible she was inspired by Godard’s comment that ”Every film is a documentary of its actors”. She makes her participants recreate moments from their past, finding out more about them through this process, and then making them act out situations that mirror the events that have filled them with dread for the future. Lian Stewart, a young woman who is saddened by the absence of her father, plays out the role of Cordelia in King Lear, and consciously rejects a father figure. James Baron, a young man whose past was marred by bullying, acts out his own death at the hands of a group of “youths” (to use the emotive phrase employed by the Right-Wing press to demonise young people). Ash… well, that would be telling, and could likely ruin the startling opening scene.
What makes Wearing’s movie so fascinating is how these fictional scenes are informed by our understanding of who these people are, and the empathic knowledge that acting out these scenes is affecting the participants on an emotional level. It says much about the nature of acting, how we perceive the act of performing, and the nature of celebrity, in the sense that we often experience stories performed by people whose private lives are known to us, while also understanding that there’s a good chance those stories are unreal as well. We have to mentally shuffle through levels of emotional expectation when watching stories performed by actors, and Wearing cleverly makes us aware of that thought-process by providing a new perspective on the audience/performer line. It sounds like the sort of meta-commentary lampooned so brilliantly in the recent episode of Community (Messianic Myths and Ancient Peoples), but it’s less self-conscious than that, and just as satisfying as any Charlie Kaufman thought-experiment. And Variety was right: Ash Akhtar should consider chasing this alternate career. ::fistbump::
While it’s hard to know whether to categorise Self Made as a documentary or a “reality” film, Errol Morris’ new film Tabloid is most definitely a documentary that follows his traditional themes of the shifting nature of truth and fiction, and would make an excellent companion-piece to Wearing’s experiment. Tabloid is much jauntier than his previous triumphs The Fog of War and The Thin Blue Line, but similarly focuses on (arguably) unreliable narrators. The stakes seem lower this time: though the tale of Joyce McKinney was once the centre of a tabloid storm in the UK, Morris smartly uses McKinney’s natural showmanship and good humour to crowdpleasing effect which was absent in those gloomy documentaries. The tale of the abduction and seduction of her Mormon lover begins weirdly and Morris beautifully edits the multiple testimonies for maximum audience pleasure: the reaction at our screening was delightfully raucous.
What’s most astonishing about the tale – at least for me – was that it happened during my lifetime, but entering the cinema I remembered nothing about it. Yes, I was a kid and can’t be expected to recall all of the things that happened in the 70s that didn’t involve Steven Spielberg or George Lucas, but as events progress you see that the story of the Manacled Mormon was pretty much inescapable for about a year, with market-leading tabloids the Mirror and the Express running constant updates on her exploits. That light and breezy tone hides a seriousness of purpose: Morris provides a useful insight into the fleeting “importance” of these sensational stories, as well as reminding us of the unscrupulousness of journalists chasing the scoop that will render their competitors’ exclusives mundane.
It’s not exactly a startling revelation that the furore surrounding Cat Bin Lady, or John Terry’s extra-marital exploits, or Gamu Nhengu’s visa troubles, will eventually amount to nothing more than a trivial distraction (though not for those involved, obviously), but just as experiencing the accelerated churn of the news cycle on Twitter shows up the gadfly nature of the media’s attention span, it’s healthy to see the long view as well, and Morris has found the perfect example of a scandal that keeps on giving. As a welcome contrast to the nonsense we find ourselves transfixed by in recent times, it’s great to experience a truly novel tabloid story: there is no way I’m going to spoil any of the twists and turns of McKinney’s life. Suffice it to say, she is a fantastically engaging and amusing individual, and some of the oddest moments of her life happened more recently than you would think. I saw “better” movies at the festival, but Tabloid is almost certainly the most amusing and infectiously enjoyable, and watching it with such an appreciative audience was an early highlight.
-
Who We Are
admiralneck
daisyhellcakes
masticateur
Shades of Caruso Mini-Blog- Listmania ’11! The Best Movies Of The Year December 31, 2011
