Review of 'My Fathers, My Mother and Me'

LFF: My Fathers, My Mother and Me

By Joanna Pocock

FILM

Paul-Julien Robert’s documentary of his return to Friedrichshof, Otto Muehl’s free-loving commune, where he grew up with his mother

Paul-Julien Robert approaches the political through the personal in his documentary My Fathers, My Mother and Me. The story begins with his birth in 1979, a time when fall-out from the Second World War was still very present for many Austrians. But the film does not tackle the post-war Austrian psyche and instead reveals Robert’s struggle to come to terms with his mother’s decision to raise him in a commune under the leadership of a megalomaniac leader, Otto Muehl.

In 1972 Muehl, co-founder of the Viennese Actionist Art movement, set up Friedrichshof with a handful of like-minded politicos and artists who espoused the destruction of the bourgeois nuclear family, the sharing of all property, free love, the collective education of children and the attainment of ecstasy through the destruction of “body armour” (an idea he took from Wilhelm Reich). All fairly noble aims, but from the archive footage Robert weaves throughout the film, we see the manifestation of these ideals as not so benign.

In one scene Muehl orders a withdrawn child to perform in front of hundreds of members of the commune. Muehl bullies him into playing a harmonica while a live band chivvy him along with bizarre jazzy circus music. The child begins to cry and Muehl barks at him to “Sing! Dance!” The child sobs. Eventually Muehl pours water over the boy while he dejectedly puffs into a mouth organ, tears streaming down his face.

Not only is this scene a devastating example of Muehl’s abuse of power, but it is made more resonant because we are watching it with Robert and his mother. In showing her this clip, Robert appears to be asking her “How could you have been complicit in this?” Throughout the film, Robert quietly levels questions at his mother, who takes them with equanimity and sometimes humour. She is likeable, intelligent but perhaps a bit distant. At this point in the film, her composure starts to crack and emotions begin to surface in her face. Robert, who felt abandoned, betrayed and confused as a child by his mother’s choice to raise him in Friedrichshof, is finally being heard.

The real story in some ways is the story of Robert’s mother, Florence. In 1975 as a woman of twenty-six, she was searching for a new way of living that rejected the patriarchal society of the 1970s when married women couldn’t even own property. Seen in this light, an attraction to an extreme alternative seems only logical. But like so many of these alternative communities, the limits of conventional society were re-enacted by a surrogate father figure who manipulated his followers. In 1991, Otto Muehl was arrested for having sex with minors and jailed for almost seven years. None of this is in the film, nor does it need to be.

Towards the end of the film Robert and his mother attend a gathering of parents and children who had lived at Friedrichshof. Two middle-aged women stand at a lectern and apologise to the children present for preventing them from having normal lives on the ‘outside’, and in some cases actually causing them physical, emotional and mental harm. The two cry as they speak. We are told in a voice-over that Robert’s mother blacked out at this moment and when she came to she had no idea why she was not in her house in France.

In their final conversation in the film, Robert’s mother admits to a sort of defeat. She tells him she had felt insecure as a mother and maybe if she had had more children she could have undone some of her mistakes. Then very quickly she adds, “But just because there were problems with Friedrichshof, you mustn’t idealise the nuclear family either!” And this is the heart of the film: to what lengths will we go to create what we think is a better world? Can naiveté excuse our mistakes? What are the responsibilities of a mother to her child and how can conflicting desires be reconciled? Robert’s need to understand, rather than condemn is admirable. At times his calm demeanour seems to hide a simmering rage at his mother’s gullibility, but mostly there is an unquenchable curiosity as to what drives people to relinquish responsibility while seeking deliverance from societal norms. And at what cost.

http://www.litro.co.uk/2013/10/lff-my-fathers-my-mother-and-me/

Review of Andrew Bujalski's 'Computer Chess'

October 16, 2013

LFF: Computer Chess

By Joanna Pocock

FILM

Charming, funny and humane - Andrew Bujalski continues the mumblecore tradition with a film about the members of a 1980s chess tournament

Patrick Riester as Peter in Andrew Bujalski's Computer Chess

Andrew Bujalski’s new film, Computer Chess, is a nostalgic nod to a more innocent time when computers took up entire rooms, men wore clip-on ties unironically and women went nowhere near anything that plugged in unless it was a vacuum cleaner. Bujalski gets the period details obsessively spot on, but the costume drama precision is almost a red herring as he is doing a lot more here than recreating a slice of history. He is talking about our relationship to technology and his relationship to cinema.

The film, set circa 1980, takes place in a faceless motel where two conventions are happening simultaneously: the computer chess programmers who are pitting their computers against each other in a chess competition, and a couples therapy group whose members re-enact their own births and aggressively rip apart loaves of bread whilst aiming for orgasmic enlightenment. In a sense both camps are just as uncomfortable in their own bodies, and both are seeking transcendence.

The geeks cushion themselves from the world with their rational intellect while the self-helpers eschew empirical knowledge for feelings. In one excruciating scene, a couple invite Peter (played brilliantly by Patrick Riester) to their room for sex. Peter’s malaise contrasts with the touchy-feelies who pretend to be at home in their skins when really they are just using their openness to get it off with strangers. The clash of mindsets is hilarious but slightly disturbing for the complete misjudgement the swingers display for the gawky, virginal Peter. This scene also gets to the core of what Bujalski seems to be saying. Neither of these two extremes has the answers to the questions brought up in the film: What is a soul? What is love? And what is it to be human? He doesn’t come out and say it, but the impression is that Bujalski feels the answers to life’s Big Questions lie in a crucial interface between heart and head.

Computer Chess shares much with the mother of mumblecore, Bujalki’s 2002 film Funny Ha Ha and its successor Mutual Appreciation (2005). It is lo-fi, loosely improvised, people move awkwardly, connections between humans are fragile and often misunderstood, intellectual fluency is stunted by introversion and yes, there is mumbling. As in his previous films where characters sit around Rohmer-style in rooms talking about life, the nerds in Computer Chess do the same only with lines like, “Chess is not war, it’s victory” and “is there a difference between real artificial intelligence and artificial real intelligence?” When one character tells a bunch of fellow spliff-smoking competitors that the future of computers will be in “dating”. One of the others asks, “What? Computers dating each other?” It’s played for laughs but we are reminded how far we have come in accepting computers into our lives. We started out shaping them, but thirty or so years later they are shaping us.

The lone woman in the nerd camp, Shelly Flintic (Robin Schwartz) is referred to throughout as the ‘Lady from MIT’ (women really have come a long way since 1980). She has the detached intelligence of Funny Ha Ha’s Marnie (Kate Dollenmeyer) albeit in a bad haircut, huge specs and terrible Lady Di blouses. As with his previous films, Computer Chess uses mainly non-actors. Gerald Peary who is fantastically deadpan as Pat Henderson, the chess convention leader, is a film studies professor, film critic and author. The stiltedness of many of the performances adds to the feel of a pre-internet period before we happily revealed all on Facebook. It reminds us of a time when privacy existed, and when people who worked with computers were the minority. We are all geeks now and live our lives publicly through our computers.

The visual aesthetic of the film with its long takes and sometimes monotone lectures on the finer points of programming along with shots of men sitting on hotel sofas brings to mind the cinema verité of the Maysles Brothers’ Salesmanand John Casavetes Husbands. Bujalski and his cinematographer, Matthias Grunsky, shot the film with analogue, Sony tube cameras made in the seventies, which could be seen as taking the nostalgia a bit far, but it elegantly adds to the period tone: the grain, the high contrast, the blurred edges, the weird light. Towards the end of the film a scene suddenly switches to colour while we follow one computer chess conventioneer Michael Papageorge (Miles Paige) out of the motel. Sound intermittently drops out of sync and in a few instances the screen splits in half. It’s all seemingly random but it works. Bujalski is having fun with the technology just like the computer whiz kids he is portraying on screen. Underneath the geeky exterior with its obsessive historical accuracy, lies a charming, funny, humane film. Maybe just like nerds in real life, when they stop talking about zeros and ones, start talking about love, and take off their specs, they are actually kind of cute and very funny underneath.

http://www.litro.co.uk/2013/10/lff-computer-chess/

Review of 'Stop the Pounding Heart'

November 2, 2013

LFF: Stop the Pounding Heart

By Joanna Pocock

FILM   LFF

The third of Roberto Minervini’s Texas Trilogy, Stop the Pounding Heart, is a subtle, fragmented piece about rural Christian America

The third instalment of Roberto Minervini’s Texas Trilogy, Stop the Pounding Heart, is a detached Bressonian look at a rural Christian community. Minervini’s hybrid documentary-fictions, which he calls “observations”, are shot using natural light and non-actors whom he follows as they go about their daily chores. The film’s integrity and formal style echo the purity of the lives he films, lending his work a timeless quality. Cinemagoers who require a strong narrative and characters who develop over time might find Minervini’s meditative, languid films hard going. But for those with patience, there are rewards.

The film’s focus is Sara Carlson, a devout fourteen-year-old Christian struggling with her budding womanhood and its potential interference with her relationship to God. Sara and her ten siblings spend their days tending and milking the family’s goats, making cheese, and praying. The quotidian rituals are hypnotic and some of the best scenes in the film. By getting up close to a family who avoid outside contamination by home-schooling their children and who live literally according to the Scriptures, Minervini shows us a world we rarely come into contact with. And to his credit he portrays this family with deep respect. It would be easy to fall into the trap of poking fun at the Carlsons for being just another bunch of crazy, rightwing, weirdo Americans. In resisting this temptation Minervini highlights the beauty, joy and solemnity inherent in the Carlson’s contemplative life.

While Sara and her mother are out selling their goat’s cheese to a family of local rodeo riders, the teenager comes into contact with a strapping young bull-rider called Colby. It is not made clear whether Sara and Colby have met before but a spark appears to be ignited. Because the physical vocabulary among Minervini’s subjects is so limited, the smallest gesture, a shy look or a wander together, speaks volumes. Therefore when Sara and Colby occupy the same shot, both of them looking at Colby’s bulls in near-silence, it comes across as intimate and meaningful even though very little dialogue is exchanged. This kind of subtlety is divisive. Some will find its minimalism elegant and others will be frustrated.

The highlight of the film comes towards the end in a gentle and moving scene between Sara and her mother LeeAnne. Sara, in a moment of weakness, is questioning her faith and she begs her mother for guidance and prayer. LeeAnne takes her daughter in her arms and asks God to cherish every one of her daughter’s footsteps and to “stop the pounding heart”. At that moment the film is pulled into focus. We become aware not only of Sara’s struggles with her faith, but with the idea of doubt as an existential component of life. There is a deep humanity in the filmmaking and in the mother’s loving response to her daughter’s pain. Rather than interpreting the faith that underpins this family as something solid, unshakeable and zealous, we see it as a constant dialogue – something alive and open to questioning. I wished Minervini could have given us more moments like this.

Minervini directed his cast of locals, farmers and bull riders to simply be themselves. This adds an ethnographic layer to Stop the Pounding Heart as we watch cowboys praying before they straddle their bucking steers, girls dressing up for tea parties in anachronistic pre-Raphaelite outfits, pregnant women firing shotguns, and even a live home birth. These images are elemental, startling and unforgettable. However, instead of using these fragments — which are perfect in and of themselves — towards building a narrative, Minervini threads them together in an unconnected manner so that they never quite add up to more than the sum of their individual parts. The rigorous constraints with which Minervini approaches his subjects, while worthy and admirable, are hurdles to the storytelling and the characters. Murky sound recording makes conversations hard to hear, and characters are kept at arm’s length making them often difficult to connect with.

Despite these reservations, Stop the Pounding Heart is worth seeing for its formal invention and single-minded vision. It is a joy watching a filmmaker work with such a pure and original methodology. However, with a bit more sculpting of his material in order to build towards some sense of drama, Stop the Pounding Heart would be a perfect gem of a film. As it stands, drained of dramatic tension, these cool but stunning shots don’t quite add up to the great film it comes close to being.

http://www.litro.co.uk/2013/11/lff-stop-the-pounding-heart/

Review of 'Night Moves'

October 25, 2013

LFF: Night Moves

By Joanna Pocock

FILM   LFF

The futility of political activism - Kelly Reichardt delivers a compelling movie about a difficult subject, a group of eco-activists who commit an extreme act for a noble cause

Night Moves, Kelly Reichardt’s fifth feature, is as formally audacious and visually compelling as any of her previous offerings, with the bonus of being a white-knuckle ride. The subject she mines here is that of the shady underworld of eco-activism, and true to her cool yet utterly engaged eye, Reichardt seeks no easy answers.

The film’s backstory is given to us in laconic dialogue with the economy and elegance that has become the trademark of the scripts she creates with Jon Raymond. She tantalisingly drip-feeds us information, and every scrap is crucial to the development of story and character. In this case, the characters being three disparate and clashing eco-activists who display more mistrust than affection for each other, but who are linked by a commitment to blow up a hydroelectric dam they believe is destroying the marine ecosystem in Oregon.

Josh (played by a wonderfully nervy Jesse Eisenberg) is the central activist. He dryly notes at the start of the film that the dam is “killing all these salmon so we can run our fucking ipods every second of our lives”. This is the closest we get to his motives and it is all we need. An alienated loner, Josh works on an organic communal farm. He is not likeable, but totally compelling and somewhat reminiscent of Alain Delon in Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï – both of them cool, detached anti-heroes with no past, only an eternal present. In an early scene we see Josh, walking alone in the woods, picking up a fallen bird’s nest and placing it delicately onto a branch. He is sensitive to nature but recognises the futility of his struggle – it’ll take more than saving a bird’s nest to fix the planet’s ills.

Josh’s accomplice, Dena (Dakota Fanning) is a slyly naïve middle-class college dropout who funds their actions by forking out ten grand for a boat and more again for the fertiliser needed to turn it into a floating bomb. The trio is rounded off with Harmon (Peter Sarsgaard), a sardonic ex-marine who lives in hiding deep in the woods. He has spent time in jail and his insouciance hints that his part in the eco-activist cause stems more from a desire to live outside the law than from a deep love of nature. In one exchange with Dena he extols the virtues of fishing. She is clearly not interested in killing animals for sport and he tells her she should “try it before all the fish are gone”. There is a streak of nihilism to his position, which stealthily infects the rest of the film.

The first half of Night Moves is pure procedure. We are shown in obsessive detail the procuring of ingredients, the creation of a viable explosive and the rigorous but flawed planning. There is minimal talking, minimal action and huge amounts of tension. As the film builds to its inevitable climax, I couldn’t help wonder how Reichardt with her limited budget would film it. How would these characters blow up a dam? Reichardt constructs the build-up to this scene perfectly by using sound as much as image. On the way to their act of terror, Josh, Dena and Harmon float wordlessly through an apocalyptic Robert Adams landscape of dead, sunken trees to the sound of Jeff Grace’s haunting, hypnotic score. The moment in which the three activists realise they have done what they set out to do is expressed in their faces not in the action. It is a stunning piece of film-making.

The second half of the film shifts from procedural to psychological as we witness the repercussions of the trio’s destructive act. For me this shift was problematic. Up until the midway point, Josh, Dena and Harmon are mysterious, existential beings, but as their act of violence forces them to face their guilt, Reichardt asks us to read them in more conventional terms. I didn’t believe the extremes to which Josh is pushed in the second half, nor did I feel they were necessary.

Reichardt redeems this minor weakness however by providing an ending that is as odd as it is surprising. Josh escapes to California where he wanders into an outdoor store piled high with every imaginable tent, sleeping bag and camping stove. He is looking for a job and is given an application to fill out, but his hand hovers over the boxes in which he is expected to fill in his personal details. His personal details have escaped him along with his identity. The atmosphere of the store, despite its pretence as a place where one can prepare for the wilderness, is one of soulless consumption. The dream of escape becomes just another pleasant shopping experience.

Night Moves is a dark film. All the action takes place in low light, which echoes the murkiness of the characters’ morals and actions, and cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt conveys this grainy undercover world with a gorgeous, noir-like elegance. Just as Meek’s Cutoff is an anti-Western and Old Joy upends the idea of the ‘buddy movie’, so Night Moves plays with the thriller genre. At its heart is the question of terrorism as an essential, angry and raw act. To what lengths should you go to make your point? And at what point does political action become theatre? Reichardt does not attempt to answer these questions; she allows them to inform her characters and their decisions. The farmer for which Josh works has his own answer: “Look out the window,” he says, “It’s a lot slower but it works”. You can blow up dams or you can grow organic vegetables. Neither position feels very much like a solution. If I were to sum up the one overriding feeling I am left with after watching Night Moves, it is of sheer futility.

With intense performances as tightly coiled as the story, this film continues to unravel inside you long after the house lights have come up. It is beautiful in its precision and detail and disturbing in its ideas. Kelly Reichardt is an artist in total control of her medium and has delivered a piece of work that is not afraid to ask the big questions and equally unafraid to leave the answers hanging.

http://www.litro.co.uk/2013/10/lff-night-moves/

Review of 'We Are the Best!'

October 22, 2013

LFF: We Are the Best!

By Joanna Pocock

FILM   LFF

Sweden’s Lukas Moodysson taps into the feminine punk-rock spirit of Pussy Riot in his latest film about three teenage girls standing against the adult world

Lukas Moodysson’s We Are The Best! is a return to the territory of Show Me Love and Together, which is why it is both completely wonderful and also slightly disappointing. Part of me couldn’t help but feel that We Are The Best!lacks some of the daring originality of Show Me Love. However it makes up for this with the utter joie de vivre of the three leads, Bobo (Mira Barkhammar), Klara (Mira Grosin) and Hedvig (Liv LeMoyne) who inhabit the cusp of teenagerhood with equal amounts of rebelliousness and innocence. Bobo, the more thoughtful and introspective character has the soulful face of Giuletta Masina in La Strada. Klara is a little stick of punk rock dynamite, and Hedvig’s handsome coolness is reminiscent of a young Liv Ullmann. The film is watchable for these stellar performances alone.

As with his two first films, We Are The Best! is a feel good film that is also insightful and political. Bobo and Klara with their short spikey hair and fledgling political beliefs are outcasts who want nothing to do with the lip-glossed bimbos in their class. In a funny twist they manage to wrest rehearsal space from a Spinal Tap-style metal band who forget to write their names down on the booking sheet of the local youth club. This bureaucratic slip-up allows the girls access to a drum set and a guitar, which they have no idea how to play.

They recruit Hedvig, a fellow classmate and Christian classical guitar-playing prodigy. Bobo is sure Hedvig can inject some musicality into their band, but Klara is worried by the girl’s devout beliefs. She eventually shrugs off any concern with the certainty that they will “influence her away from God”. Their plan works. Suddenly Bobo’s drum banging and Klara’s screeching over a few strums of out-of-tune guitar begin to take shape as Hedvig helps them form their anthem ‘Hate Sport’ into a punky piece of musical protest against gym class.

The one bit of plotting comes when the nameless band is invited to play at the ‘Santa Rock’ Christmas concert in Västerås (a provincial town outside Stockholm). They accept along with the metal band they gazumped earlier at the youth centre. Shouts of “You’re so ugly” and “Communist whore cunts!” are launched at them and in response they change their lyrics from “Hate Sport” to “Hate Västerås” and are thrown out. The cri de coeur that runs throughout the film that “Punk is not dead” is lived out here in a true moment of triumph. Their budding feminist selves have prevailed over a roomful of misogyny. Moodysson gently has a go at provincial attitudes as he did with Show Me Love (whose original title after all was Fucking Åmål) and yet does it with such deftness and lightness it never feels nasty.

Moodysson creates a world in which children are the wise ones and adults are clueless, self-absorbed and out of touch. This works to a degree. The yearning of our heroines to grow up is palpable and yet there are no specimens of adult life that they might in any way want to emulate, which is a standard trope of teen fiction. Although to most thirteen year olds all adults are basically idiots, I would have liked Moodysson to inject some nuance into this view. Where he gives the teenagers complexity, he ridicules the adults. And perhaps he intends to convey the loss of spirit as children morph into adults. Either way it gets laughs but feels at times a bit thin.

Like every one of Moodysson’s films, this one looks and sounds absolutely beautiful. Shot by Ulf Brantas, the colours, the compositions and the light are seductive without being sentimental. As a period piece the sets are not exaggerated. We know we are in the 80s without being bashed over the head with it. Based on Coco Moodysson’s graphic novel Never Goodnight, We Are The Best! has at its heart a proto-Pussy Riot feeling that punk is a political statement and that girls need to be part of it. Bobo, Klara and Hedvig are fighting against the prevailing mindset that only boys can have a voice, and this adds to the film’s urgency.

Moodysson has made a film that highlights the selfishness of the adult world and the innocence and fragility of children. And yet, what he seems to forget is that all these bourgeois, superficial, damaged grown-ups were once young. They are not aberrations, and their awfulness is nothing more than the result of living in an imperfect world. Minor quibble aside, this is a soulful, unpretentious and optimistic film that delves into what it’s like to be thirteen with total honesty. It may seem slight, and yet by conveying the pain and beauty of growing up, We Are The Best! captures perfectly that fleeting yet glorious moment just before adulthood takes us under its wing.

http://www.litro.co.uk/2013/10/lff-we-are-the-best/

Review of James Franco's 'As I Lay Dying'

October 10, 2013

LFF: As I Lay Dying

By Joanna Pocock

FILM

James Franco adapts the ‘unfilmable’ William Faulkner modern classic for the big screen

William Faulkner’s modernist slice of American literature, As I Lay Dying is such a verbal tour-de-force that it seems mad to even think of making it into a film. But James Franco has not only written and directed the first film adaptation of Faulkner’s southern gothic masterpiece but stars in it as well. And this is the major flaw at its heart: Franco’s decision to cast himself as Darl Bundren.

Darl is one of five children born to the violent matriarch Addie Bundren, whose act of dying gives the book its title. His voice in the novel is the most objective of the fifteen voices, and his observations come closest to being those of a narrator. Darl’s role is clearly the obvious choice for Franco, and yet all the way through the film I was longing for the Will Oldham of John Sayles’s Matewan or the Paul Dano of Meek’s Cutoff. The part needs a timeless, poetic hero, not the youthful face of Gucci.

Despite Franco’s affected and self-conscious performance, the rest of the cast bring a low-key intensity to their roles. Particularly Logan Marshall-Green as the aggressive, violent Jewel and Brady Permenter who is incredibly touching as the young Vardaman. Tim Blake Nelson as the widower Anse, who stands by Addie’s wishes to be buried forty miles from the family home, carries off the patriarch role well. With his hump and prosthetic mouth, Nelson plays the part as straight-up tragedy.

This brings me onto a second, although smaller flaw: Franco’s decision to strip out any element of farce. The tragedies of Biblical proportion faced by the blighted Bundrens as they set out to bury Addie — floods, fire, rape and amputations — are all rendered faithfully, and yet this worthiness turns the film into a somewhat po-faced piece of cultural product. In the hands of say, the Coen Brothers, the black humour of the book would have been celebrated and would have injected more life into the film. Franco is being too respectful and perhaps feels hamstrung by tackling such a Great Modern Classic.

These problems aside, Franco does bring intelligence to this project. There is confidence in the direction and a visual consistency in the earthy tones, the claustrophobia, the dirt. The lushness of the Mississippi landscape is beautifully filmed by Christina Volos, while Kim O’Keefe’s electronic score veers between moody atonal noise and more conventional ‘film music’ lyricism. The latter creates the emotional response it is after, but is perhaps a touch obvious at times.

You cannot talk about this film without tackling Franco’s use of the split-screen, slow-motion and actors speaking directly to the camera — formal devices which attempt to capture filmically what Faulkner addresses with his multiple points of view and fragmented prose. All of these devices work towards dissolving any idea that a story must be told chronologically, as they remove us from a straightforward telling of events, and this feels true to the spirit of the text. However they are too superficial to get inside the characters’ minds, and therefore don’t come close to capturing Faulkner’s multiple interiorities. If there were ever a book one could call ‘unfilmable’ it would be As I Lay Dying with its insistence on the use of words and language as a medium for both hiding and revealing meaning and truth whilst simultaneously spinning a great, universal story.

I wondered while watching As I Lay Dying whether Franco made this film to show the world he could do something on a monumental scale, or to see for himself whether it was possible. Perhaps he was politically motivated. Making a depression-era film in this new age of austerity, could be seen as a cynical bid for popularity or a more genuine desire to give voice to the growing number of dispossessed who are rarely given screen time in Hollywood. Whatever his reasons, he has contributed a solid piece of work, with a few flaws and one big tragedy at its core which, like Anse Bundgren’s, is the result of stubbornness, greed and folly.

http://www.litro.co.uk/2013/10/lff-as-i-lay-dying/