A Lil' Bit o' Rotterdam in My Life (Patreon)

I am not sure how many films I will be watching with my IFFR Press credentials. I must admit, nothing looks unmissable so far. But I wanted to provide quick notes on the films I do see. I'm afraid full reviews would slow me down too much.

Riders of Justice (Anders Thomas Jensen, 2020)

This is only the second of Jensen's directorial efforts I've seen, the first being the agreeably offbeat comedy Men & Chickens. Riders of Justice, which opened in Demark last November as was selected at the IFFR's opening film, certainly has its good points. Jensen and his actors -- particularly Mads Mikkelsen and Nikolaj Lie Kass -- do an admirable job of navigating the film's rather severe tonal shifts. It's fairly evident that Jensen thinks he's grappling with Big Ideas here. After a woman's sudden death in an accident, her husband (Mikkelsen) and the man who believes he should have died in her stead (Kass) become obsessed with two anti-coping mechanisms, revenge and coincidence. Given the focus on grasping at fragments of meaning in order to make sense of a random world, Riders of Justice is timely, if nothing else. But there's no avoiding the basic familiarity of this film, despite its constant efforts to convince you of its originality. It's an unlikely pairing of a latter-day Liam Neeson renegade actioner and Philippe da Broca's "what if the crazy are the sanest of all?" comedy King of Hearts. Jensen adds that chocolate to the peanut butter and produces exactly what you'd expect.

earthearthearth (Daïchi Saïto, 2021)

As far as I know, this is Saïto's longest film to date, and although it does not make incontestable use of the extended run time (30 minutes), it is seldom boring and frequently exhilarating. Saïto has shot hours of landscape footage in Chile and Argentina, mostly focusing on the horizon line. Using tinting and color correction, earthearthearth frequently renders the ground as a pure black absence, coextensive with the empty border of the screen. So we are getting a series of horizontal forms of sky and hilltops that result in a set of scalloped color-objects, sometimes appearing alone, sometimes paired, and eventually subject to complex superimpositions. The high contrast cinematography combines with Saïto's otherworldly color palette to produce the painterly intensity of modified pop-art. Some of the tones recall late Warhol (especially the "Electric Chairs", and the overall style and approach resemble a simpler, more streamlined Pat O'Neill. Once again, Saïto is working with improvisational musician Jason Sharp, and while the score is propulsive enough, it tends to fade into the background more than it should, easing our engagement with Saïto's images rather than complicating it.