AFI Fest roundup (Patreon)

Toronto has been my big fall festival for the past two decades, but there are always a few notable films that aren't selected by TIFF, for whatever reason, or that I just can't fit into my hectic schedule there. Hence my annual November jaunt down to Hollywood for AFI Fest, which reliably fills in some (but never all) of the gaps. Acquired 10 tickets this year, but I wound up not using four of them due to traffic hassles related to the Woolsey Fire, which at this writing is still raging uncomfortably close to my house (though I'm in no immediate danger; last Friday is when it looked really hairy). Here's a quick rundown of the six I did see.

Amateurs (Gabriela Pichler, Sweden): 64

Pichler’s at once a realist and a romantic, determined to find the sweet within the sour. Amateurs lacks (by design) the dynamic lead performance that made Eat Sleep Die so memorable, but it similarly keeps feinting toward despondency and then refusing to surrender, a strategy that feels productively defiant. The narrative logline—small Swedish town courting a German superstore drafts high schoolers to create a promotional video—suggests a comedy, and there are indeed plenty of laughs here; not since Max Fischer's Serpico has there been a more endearing display of unearned theatrical bravado than the group of boys who strike awkward gang poses and warn outsiders to stay the hell away or face their violent wrath. But Pichler also seriously explores that joke's xenophobic undercurrent, focusing almost entirely on first- and second-generation immigrants and—this is the rare and valuable part—acknowledging that their experiences are far from monolithic. Climax might have worked better were the girls' Lav Diaz-length movie a bit less earnestly banal (and if it didn't feature more selfie-stick footage than I’ve previously seen in my life, realistic though that assuredly is), but it's entirely typical of Pichler to shift from resounding triumph to dismal failure and then back to a much smaller, more personal triumph within the space of a single scene. 

Knife + Heart (Yann Gonzalez, France): 40

Most of the reviews out of Cannes cited De Palma as an influence, but this deliberately trashy erotic thriller reminded me more of Joe Eszterhas, at least on the script level. Either way, definitely not my thing, though I did at least appreciate Vanessa Paradis' commitment to her ludicrous character, and am willing to concede that Gonzalez (brother of M83's Anthony, who supplies the film's score) can do stylishly lurid. Or maybe it's luridly stylish. Entirely possible that he's working in a mode that the colorblind (= moi) can't properly appreciate. Peers whose opinions I value aren't very keen on this film either, though, so I suspect it's just one of Fremaux's theoretically laudable gambles that didn't quite work out.

The Wild Pear Tree (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey): 48

Even talkier than Winter Sleep, which I wouldn't have thought possible. Dogu Demirkol (who has only one other IMDb credit, also from this year) is no Haluk "What the hell am I doing in the new Halloween?" Bilginer, however, so Murat Cemcir, playing his ne'er-do-well dad, has to take up the emotional slack. Final scene between them plays beautifully, but it's a real slog getting there, and this time Ceylan doesn't have as stunning a location with which to visually offset the pettiness. Honestly just think he's succumbing to verbal bloat at this point, with three consecutive films clocking in at over 2.5 hours; cut the excess prattle and you'd have, well, Distant, which I still consider his finest effort to date. 

Black Mother (Khalik Allah, USA): W/O

Funny thing: I'd also previously bailed on Allah's Field Niggas, but couldn't remember why. Its formally striking qualities stuck with me, whereas whatever had bugged me quickly dissipated; it's the rare W/O that left me feeling more impressed than underwhelmed. Black Mother is basically the same movie, relocated from Harlem to Jamaica, and within the first 30 seconds I had to stifle what would have been a loud "Ohhhh, right." Love what Allah does visually, and most of what he does conceptually, but his penchant for employing asynchronous audio—we hear his subjects talking over shots of them not talking, more or less 100% of the time—drives me right up the wall. Not a problem others share, apparently, and that's fine. 

Ray & Liz (Richard Billingham, UK): 54

Went into this totally ignorant of Billingham's work as a photographer, but quickly intuited that it must be autobiographical. Having recently revisited Gary Oldman's somewhat similar Nil by Mouth, I couldn't help but make unflattering mental comparisons (even though I'm less keen on that film than I once was); this Ray's a non-entity compared to Ray Winstone, and the cruelty : tenderness ratio isn't nearly as well calibrated. Structuring the film as extended flashbacks from a framing narrative that doesn't involve either child seems an especially poor choice, given the eventual (and welcome) emphasis on Richard's younger brother. Billingham also sometimes forgets, in his quest for exacting verisimilitude, that we don't know the context—I was unsure exactly who the quasi-evil dude in flashback #1 was (their lodger, apparently), and that sort of unproductive confusion, in a memory piece that dispenses with minor characters at will as it jumps across years and decades, makes it difficult to process what you're watching. Works primarily as an accumulation of grotesque details...which is to say, when it mimics still photography, which is where this originated. Not everything has to be a movie.

Under the Silver Lake (David Robert Mitchell, USA): 76

Dialed my expectations as low as possible, given the shellacking it received at Cannes, and then was bowled over literally from the very first shot. Crucially (though this only becomes clear in retrospect), Mitchell shoots that banal-yet-arresting image from inside the building, forcing you to read backwards; the extra bit of effort thus required—its value and utility—is the film's ostensible subject, gradually metamorphosing into a full-blown, futile quest for transcendence. What many of the folks who despise this movie fail to recognize is that Mitchell at once respects the yearning and relentlessly mocks the yearner. It's not screenwriter's laziness that Sam appears to have not only no profession but no aspirations—he gets testy when someone innocently asks what he does, or wants to do, as if such mundane concerns are downright insulting. Nor is it strictly a running gag that everyone who encounters Sam after a certain point notes that he literally stinks. When people lob charges of misogyny at a film that has two bros use a drone to spy on a model, then grow uncomfortable when she strips to her underwear and all but breaks down crying...exactly how much more blatant do you need the movie to be? Maybe if it put one of its intentional female appendages in a series of "slutty [profession]" costumes (while giving her voice-of-reason dialogue)? Oh right it actually does that. I could see faulting Mitchell for overkill, but saying "at a certain point, commentary simply becomes content" (as does this review—one of the nicer, more reasonable pans) is tantamount to dismissing the very notion of satire. 

Anyway, I mightily digress. Under the Silver Lake dunks on its dipshit of a protagonist (beautifully played by Garfield as haplessness incarnate, right down to the way he walks and runs throughout; that puppy-dog quality no doubt gets in the way of folks recognizing that he's meant to be kind of awful, to which I'd say Hello, hello McFly, look at his expression in the final shot), but it's also achingly sincere about the innate human desire to believe there's some secret code that will reveal the secret to everlasting happiness, or at least enable some basic understanding of what the hell's going on. The film even merrily dismantles its own restorative function, insisting that all creativity is fundamentally mercenary (via what I'd like to believe is a parody of The Matrix Reloaded's Architect). I'm still a little torn on the degree to which Mitchell leans on David Lynch (specifically, Mulholland Drive), formally and tonally, but Lynch's use of tantalizing signifiers (and madonna/whore complex) is a perfect example of what Mitchell finds both seductive and troubling. Also, this is such a smooth, supremely confident funhouse ride, even at 139 minutes, that I can't fathom comparisons to an unwieldy assortment of half-digested ideas like Southland Tales. Just ignore those should you see ’em. More after a second viewing next spring, but this is easily my pleasant surprise of the year. #FuckTheBuzz