Film Festivals Archives - Page 5 of 46

Telluride ’22: Tár

October 2, 2022****/****, 2022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Music, Telluride

****/****
starring Cate Blanchett, Nina Hoss, Noémie Merlant, Mark Strong
written and directed by Todd Field

by Walter Chaw Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) is a monster. She’s also a genius of surpassing brilliance, which begs the question–as it so often does, although the artist is usually male–of what the connection might be between genius and monstrosity. Artists and athletes get a certain pass for their behaviour. The myth of the difficult genius is a popular one fostered, I suspect, by the “geniuses” themselves to excuse their neurodivergence…or the unchecked privilege and sense of entitlement their preternatural abilities have won them. When Todd Field, who has not made a bad film, though this is only his third in 21 years, makes the genius in question a woman, there is now the possibility the monster is a victim as well. A victim of systemic misogyny who has internalized that misogyny; a victim of a patriarchal collection of values and standards for success that diminish women, one who has figured out how to manipulate and exploit those values for her own advancement. I mean, what choice does she really have? The pathway to fame and success in this culture entails climbing a ladder constructed from the bodies of those who didn’t survive the journey. It’s dog-eat-dog out there, people tell you–but no one tells you this cannibalism metaphor is more a literal warning than an artful turn of phrase.

Telluride ’22: The Wonder

September 30, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride, Thriller

**½/****
starring Florence Pugh, Niamh Algar, Kila Lord Cassidy, Ciarán Hinds
screenplay by Alice Birch and Emma Donoghue and Sebastián Lelio, based on the novel by Donoghue
directed by Sebastián Lelio

by Walter Chaw Sebastián Lelio’s The Wonder aspires to the scabrous experimental satire of Lars von Trier’s Dogville, down to establishing itself on an open soundstage, but it doesn’t quite have that film’s intellectual rigour, nor its nihilism. Some would say that’s to its credit. I guess I’m glad I didn’t feel like swallowing a shotgun after The Wonder, but I do, er, wonder if its effectiveness isn’t undermined by its essential hopefulness. I had a similar problem with co-screenwriter/source novelist Emma Donaghue’s Room, which treats severe trauma as not only a thing small children don’t suffer for some reason, but a thing small children are designed to heal in adults. It’s appalling. Evidently, Donaghue is stuck on a theme, as The Wonder is also about sexual abuse and the imprisonment of a young woman. It’s also, again, about a child tasked with redeeming the soul of a family and a society. But as the film ends right at the point the real consequences of the atrocities it portrays are about to bloom, we can at least imagine that its happy ending will be marred by the howl of PTSD’s florid demons. The Wonder is an improvement over Room as well in the sense that it’s a full-frontal attack on the patriarchy and its repulsive handmaiden–organized religion–rather than a somewhat tepid thriller with mishandled social grenades. Any full-bore offensive against systems of oppression, especially one as handsomely helmed and brilliantly performed as The Wonder, has undeniable value. Yet I can’t shake the feeling that Donaghue, for all the darkness of her narratives, is mainly interested in the fairy-tale ending.

Telluride ’22: Women Talking

September 26, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride

**½/****
starring Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Ben Whishaw, Frances McDormand
screenplay by Sarah Polley, based upon the book by Miriam Toews
directed by Sarah Polley

by Walter Chaw At the end of the note that opens Miriam Toews’s novel Women Talking, she says that her book is “both a reaction through fiction to these true-life events, and an act of female imagination.” Sarah Polley’s adaptation begins with the same declaration of “female imagination,” and it occurred to me finally, after sitting on the film for a couple of weeks before writing on it (and after reading Towes’s book for the first time to try to better understand my disquiet), that my problem with Women Talking is mainly one of my own expectations of the text. I expected this to be a galvanizing bit of agitprop: a rallying cry and a soapbox. It was an expectation exacerbated by Polley’s intro to the film at its world premiere in Telluride, where she introduced an “army of women” that included 11 cast members and one producer, Dede Gardner, who is the president of Plan B Entertainment, the production company founded by Brad Pitt. Though Pitt, too, is a producer on Women Talking, he was for obvious reasons absent on that stage–the same reasons, I reckon, that led to male characters in the Toews source being pared away for the film. But while it has powerful moments, as any piece of art inspired by a real-life case of mass rape (including the rape of children as young as three) in a closed-off religious cult (aren’t they all?) would have powerful moments, Women Talking is a romantic fantasy told from the perspective of a dreamy male narrator who has a doomed crush on a perfect projection of gauzy, unearthly femininity. It’s mostly my fault for assuming it was something else.

TIFF ’22: Sick

September 25, 20222022, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Film Festivals, Horror, Thriller, TIFF

***/****
starring Gideon Adlon, Dylan Sprayberry, Beth Million, Jane Adams
written by Kevin Williamson
directed by John Hyams

by Angelo Muredda The Spring 2020 lockdown gets pulled out of the cultural memory hole in Sick, where vulgar auteurism favourite John Hyams proves himself a capable new aesthetic partner for screenwriter Kevin Williamson’s aging Gen-X insights. A satisfyingly nasty and well-executed cold open sets the scene, updating Scream‘s terrorism-by-home phone set-piece with a killer who’s a passive-aggressive texter and summarily dispatching a reluctant young mask-wearer who comes home empty-handed during the great toilet paper drought of April 2020. From there, it’s off to a remote country house with actual protagonists Parker (Gideon Adlon) and Miri (Beth Million), the latter more COVID-conscious than her reluctantly isolated social-butterfly friend. Their plan to ride out quarantine in relative seclusion soon falters when Parker’s sometimes-boyfriend shows up, paving the way for a worse door-crasher: the athletic, text-happy, black-clad killer from the opening sequence.

TIFF ’22: Walk Up

September 24, 20222022, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Film Festivals, South Korea, TIFF

***/****
starring Kwon Hae-hyo, Lee Hye-young, Song Sunmi, Seok-ho Shin
directed by Hong Sang-soo

by Angelo Muredda A winding staircase serves as the connective tissue linking the disparate segments in Hong Sang-soo’s Walk Up, a melancholy and self-deprecating profile of the Artist as a Depressive Loner that neatly tracks a middle-aged director’s relationships, career, and health across his time spent on the various floors of his building. The prolific filmmaker’s latest riff on his usual motifs–among them, social drinking, doppelgängers, and the awkwardness of film culture–sees him in a downcast mood, reflected in the minimalist set-design and black-and-white digital photography, as well as the none-too-hopeful attitude towards making and promoting art in a pandemic.

TIFF ’22: EO

September 17, 20222022, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Italy, Poland, TIFF

***½/****
starring Sandra Drzymalska, Lorenzo Zurzolo, Mateusz Kościukiewicz, Isabelle Huppert
written by Ewa Piaskowska, Jerzy Skolimowski
directed by Jerzy Skolimowski

by Angelo Muredda A donkey meets the dregs of human civilization and comes out worse for wear in Jerzy Skolimowski's EO, a sometimes whimsical but ultimately gnarly animal-rights fable that earns its righteous closing exhortation against the factory-farming industry and anyone who tacitly endorses it by eating meat. Though thematically indebted to animal odysseys as disparate as Au Hasard Balthazar, The Incredible Journey, and War Horse, EO is at once more formally adventurous in its endlessly roving camera and psychedelic set-pieces and more dispiriting than even the Bressonian incarnation of this subgenre, ultimately coming off like a noble beast's ground-level vision of the horrors of Come and See.

TIFF ’22: The Eternal Daughter

September 14, 20222022, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Film Festivals, Mystery, TIFF, UK

***½/****
starring Tilda Swinton, Carly-Sophia Davies, Joseph Mydell, Alfie Sankey-Green
written and directed by Joanna Hogg

by Angelo Muredda Joanna Hogg follows up her autobiographical The Souvenir films with a formal digestif in The Eternal Daughter, which filters her usual thematic preoccupations with memory, space, and creation born of loss through the appropriate genre container of English ghost stories, with style and warmth to spare. A gently spooky, dryly funny, and mournful B-side to those films, as well as a companion piece to her earlier texts where personal relationships are tested away from home in rented villas (Unrelated) and cottages (Archipelago), the film stars Hogg’s childhood friend and frequent collaborator Tilda Swinton, who reprises her Souvenir role as an older version of patrician mother Rosalind while also standing in for her own daughter, Honor Swinton Byrne, as Rosalind’s daughter Julie, a filmmaker who routinely mines her personal life in her artistic practice. Eager to finally learn more about her buttoned-up mother–and, Rosalind suspects, spin new work out of her stories–Julie treats Rosalind (and her dog) to a memory-jogging birthday stay at a mansion from her youth that’s now a deserted, mist- and foliage-enshrouded hotel occupied only by the brusque night clerk (brimming with eat-the-rich intensity by Carly-Sophia Davies) and kindly late-night groundskeeper (Joseph Mydell). The women exchange sad stories and pour over the stingy four items on the menu in the seemingly haunted hotel while the days and nights wear on, unceremoniously marked by their routines of dog-walking, pill-taking, and tiptoeing late at night amidst the mysterious sounds of an open window rattling in the wind.

TIFF ’22: I Like Movies

September 13, 20222022, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

**½/****
starring Isaiah Lehtinen, Krista Bridges, Romina D’Ugo, Percy Hynes White
written and directed by Chandler Levack

by Bill Chambers At the beginning of this pandemic without end, I bought a used camcorder off eBay so that I could digitize the mountains of footage I generated making movies with friends as a teenager. It was a trip down memory lane that confirmed something I’d always suspected and feared: I was a complete tyrant. Make that dick. I was a misfit with control issues stemming from disability, and I was obsessed with movies. Add a video camera to that–at least in the early ’90s, when they were still novel–and you get Napoleon. With his black moptop and squat frame, high-schooler Lawrence Kweller (Isaiah Lehtinen) could be a live-action Gene Belcher–but the huge chip on his shoulder and his voluminous clothing sooner bring Ignatius J. Reilly to mind. He’s funny in small doses. Certainly the opening scene of film critic Chandler Levack’s feature debut I Like Movies is so uncanny I could only laugh. Lawrence and his best friend–his only friend–Matt Macarchuck (Percy Hynes White) have made a silly video for class. The teacher, Mr. Olenick (Anand Rajaram), shuts it off after it fades out, and Lawrence protests that he’s skipped the blooper reel and end-credit outtakes. Mr. Olenick asks what their spoof of A Christmas Carol had to do with the assigned topic (“bias in the media”), and Lawrence says, “I just decided I wanted to do something, you know, more personal and from the heart.” A classmate, Lauren (Eden Cupid), sticks up for the video by calling it “cute”–a word that only makes Lawrence apoplectic. Everything that comes out of Lawrence’s mouth here probably came out of mine during my senior year of English, when I made a movie about Elvis faking his death to hide from Satan and called it a book report on The Great Gatsby.

Telluride ’22: Aftersun

September 11, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride, UK

***/****
starring Paul Mescal, Francesca Corio, Celia Rowlson-Hall, Brooklyn Toulson
written and directed by Charlotte Wells

by Walter Chaw My parents are dead; my in-laws, too. Us outliving them is how they would’ve wanted it, and that’s the wonder of surviving, isn’t it, that this is what happens when everything works out? My dad has been dead for 19 years now, and that anniversary is coming up soon. I’m bad with dates, but my body seems to remember, and I can feel him retreating in my memory. I can’t really recall what his laugh sounded like anymore. We weren’t the kind of family that took home movies. I’m careful not to disturb the pile of dead leaves that is my childhood, though, because what if there’s nothing in the middle of all those paper-thin fragments? Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun is about trying to piece together who your father used to be once he’s gone: dead or dead enough; it’s never clear which it is in Wells’s movie, but it hardly matters. We can glean a traumatic event has shaken Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall), who turns to a small pile of old DV videotapes she took as an 11-year-old on a trip to Greece with her dad in search of answers to questions she doesn’t know how to ask. The questions the film itself asks are elliptical, elusive, as diaphanous as the images Wells puts together to present the insubstantial nothing that’s left over after all this time. I’m reminded of childish experiments with microscopes, looking at a housefly’s wing under magnification to find hundreds of opaque cells joined in an unknowable order, a jumble, that doesn’t give any insight into the bigger picture, much less its function. Viewed in microcosm, anything is just confused nothing.

Telluride ’22: Bones & All

September 6, 2022****/****, 2022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Italy, Romance, Telluride

Bones and All
****/****
starring Taylor Russell, Timothée Chalamet, Mark Rylance, Michael Stuhlbarg
screenplay by David Kajganich, based on the novel by Camille DeAngelis
directed by Luca Guadagnino

by Walter Chaw Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All is every single thing I like packed into one film: a swooning gothic romance; a gory and uncompromising cannibal movie; an American Honey middle-American travelogue; and a vision of first love as a consumptive, Romanticist fire. Shot in dirty sepia tones by DP Arseni Khachaturan (if you’ve not seen Dea Kulumbegashvili’s Beginning, Khachaturan’s lensing is one of the dozens of reasons you should remedy that), it has about it an atmosphere at once nostalgic for the 1980s, during which it’s set, and aware of how the passage of time memorializes everything into unreliable emotional histories. I have no intellectual mechanism for retrieving memories–it’s all about the feel. I realized during one scene that a girl, Kayla (Anna Cobb), was wearing a Cyndi Lauper T-shirt, and the impossible tangle of reactions I had made what might happen to her unbearable to contemplate. She became precious to me in an instant. She is somehow part of my history. (A disgusting person will later wear a Dokken tee, and I had a visceral reaction to that, too.) The picture’s needle drops, from Duran Duran‘s “Save a Prayer” to Joy Division‘s “Atmosphere” and New Order‘s propulsive/mesmerizing “Your Silent Face,” offer evidence of a creative team who listened to the whole album instead of cherry-picked singles; the music is used as a mnemonic device for oldsters and a gateway drug for their kids. I still remember one doomed summer day in high school that started with my friend picking me up for us to go record shopping, Love and Rockets‘ fourth album whirring away in his cassette deck, my hand porpoising through the air of my open window–that feeling of being completely alive. So alive. Kate Bush just enjoyed a renaissance–I can only hope the same for Ian Curtis and Bernard Sumner after the Timothée Chalamet hive assimilates this film into their holy doctrine. It’s worth appreciating how “Atmosphere” and “Your Silent Face” are both anthems about finding your voice or making a statement through silence (ditto “Lick it Up,” off the first KIϟϟ album where they take off their makeup), and so these aren’t merely nostalgia triggers. Every element of Bones and All helps to amplify Guadagnino’s themes of discovering who you are in the midst of the whirlwind.

Telluride ’22: Empire of Light

September 5, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Romance, Telluride, UK

*/****
starring Olivia Colman, Micheal Ward, Tom Brooke, Colin Firth
written and directed by Sam Mendes

by Walter Chaw While I know the “light” of the title refers to the light that carries a film from carbon arc to silver screen in a grand Art Deco theatre called the “Empire,” what it more accurately refers to is Empire of Light‘s puffed-up inconsequence. Whatever one thinks of Sam Mendes’s films (and I think not much of them if I can help it), Mendes is not the first director who swims to mind when it comes time to tackle questions of racism, “crazy” women, and institutional misogyny. Particularly not when it’s all wrapped in awards-trolling prestige, couched in the merry, glad-handing fuckery of “movies can bring us all together, and so can ska-punk pioneers the English Beat–and let me read to you the last stanza of ‘Death’s Echo’ by Auden, here, my hand, child.”

Telluride ’22: Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths

September 4, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Mexico, Streaming, Telluride

Bardo
Bardo (or False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths)
Bardo, falsa crónica de unas cuantas verdades
½*/****
starring Daniel Giménez Cacho, Hugo Albores, Andrés Almeida, Misha Arias De La Cantolla
written by Nicolás Giacobone & Alejandro G. Iñárritu
directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu

by Walter Chaw I can’t tell you how tempting it is to just re-post my review of Birdman for Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Bardo with a neon “BUT MORE SO” flashing over it, given that I’ve already invested a full three hours in the Mexican auteur’s latest altar to unseemly false modesty. (Oscars four and five, here we come.) This one is another technically dazzling cri de cœur featuring a tortured artist caught in the vicissitudes of a midlife crisis. The stand-in for Iñárritu is Mexican investigative journalist Silverio (a wonderful Daniel Giménez Cacho), who returns to Mexico for the first time in years on the eve of his winning a prestigious award from an American institution. This leads to the usual mid-life stuff: a visit with a dead father and a dying mother; a raucous party where his old friends give him shit for exploiting Mexicans and Mexican culture for gringo fame, power, and approval; a magic-realist consideration of a still-born child, resulting in a repulsive gag played like a circus trick in which a newborn is shoved back into the womb; and the exploration of impostor syndrome, which feels increasingly disingenuous with every enormous set-piece ripped off the Film School Mount Olympus. Bardo is Jay Sherman’s 8½, and knowing it doesn’t excuse it.

Telluride ’22: Good Seconds (An Introduction)

September 3, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, Film Festivals, Telluride

by Walter Chaw The plan was to drop my kid off at school this morning and then do the six-and-a-half-hour drive to Telluride, where, per tradition, I’d hide in the company of dear friends and try to refill tanks that have gotten dangerously low in the interim year. It’s an excellent place to do it: Telluride is not only geographically remote, set in a valley after what seems like endless ribbons of winding mountain roads, but emotionally as well–a diving bell in the midnight zone of my depression. I wasn’t sure I was going to make it this year–not to Telluride, but at all. My experience of depression is it’s a thing I can manage most of the time. Then sometimes and often for no proximate reason at all…I can’t.

Far from the Madding Cloud: An Interview with Iuli Gerbase

January 17, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Brazil, Film Festivals, Interviews, Sundance

I first caught Iuli Gerbase's fantastic debut The Pink Cloud as part of last year's virtual Sundance and came away from it feeling like I'd seen perhaps the definitive film of the pandemic. But it wasn't a pandemic movie, per se. It was written in 2017 and shot in 2019, meaning its story of two people negotiating isolation is engaged in unpacking a different kind of virulence. The script was completed post-Trump but pre-Bolsonaro, so this Brazilian film isn't even exactly a political metaphor, although it could certainly be read that way. While it's good, publicity-wise, for The Pink Cloud to seem a work of prescience, it's bad in that the picture's prescience detracts from the thorniness of its broader sociological themes. Given time, its embedded subtext concerning a patriarchal system reinforcing traditional gender roles should emerge as the novelty of it as the world's grimmest Magic 8-ball recedes.

SDAFF ’21: Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy

December 7, 2021****/****, 2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Japan, Romance, San Diego Asian Film Festival

Gûzen to sôzô
****/****
starring Kotone Furukawa, Ayumu Nakajima, Kiyohiko Shibukawa, Katsuki Mori, Fusako Urabe, Aoba Kawai
written and directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi

by Walter Chaw Ryusuke Hamaguchi listens well. His films may be indicated by the denseness of their dialogue, their patience in allowing their characters to speak it, and his trust in his actors to do unbroken takes and in his audience to go along for the ride, but what enchants about them is how carefully they hear what their characters are saying, and how they invite us to do the same. At some point during each of Hamaguchi’s films, I’ve found myself leaning in–not because the mix is too low, but because I’m socially conditioned to lean towards a speaker when they’re saying something that’s at once difficult for them to say and imperative that they say it. I’m giving these characters eye contact and attention. Hamaguchi’s movies are a form of communion–that is to say, a connection that touches on profundity. Given their intimacy and wisdom, they hold within them the capacity to rip my guts out. Which they do, remorselessly and sweetly. Does that describe the concept of “winsome”? In “Magic,” the first of the three short films that comprise Hamaguchi’s Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, beautiful Tsugumi (Hyunri), in the back of a long cab ride with her friend Meiko (Kotone Furukawa), describes a platonic first date in which she and her partner “caress” each other with their words. Not “talk dirty,” she clarifies–getting to know the other person by telling the truth when lies are expected. Through Tsugumi, Hamaguchi is talking about his process.

SDAFF ’21: Introduction + In Front of Your Face

November 14, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, San Diego Asian Film Festival, South Korea

인트로덕션
INTRODUCTION
**/****
starring Kim Min-hee, Park Mi-so, Shin Seok-ho
written and directed by Hong Sang-soo

당신 얼굴 앞에서
IN FRONT OF YOUR FACE
**½/****
starring Cho Yunhee, Kwon Hae-hyo, Lee Hye-young
written and directed by Hong Sang-soo

by Walter Chaw Hong Sang-soo’s films, more so than most, are only ever about Hong Sang-soo–and in his mind, Hong Sang-soo is Henrik Ibsen: the iconoclast, the great social observer and auto-didact, the artist who, late in his career, shifted his observations from class concerns in general to the insular peculiarities of individuals imprisoned by lifetimes of secrets. Hong is now more playwright and stage director than filmmaker; increasingly, the act of capturing his interpersonal dissections on film has felt like an afterthought unto inconvenience. One gets the sense Hong would rather be left alone with his company of players like the playwright/theatre director hero of Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, initiating a lifetime of rehearsals with no opening date in sight. I think, closer to the truth, he can’t get out of his head anymore. Maybe it’s no surprise, then, that two new Hong films are dropping simultaneously, given that both credit Hong as director/writer/editor (and, one presumes, sound engineer, gaffer, and craft services). In Front of Your Face is the less consumer-grade-home-movie-seeming between it and Introduction, though neither seems like something that took much time to put together, landing the same way as vignettes in a local one-act play festival might. Which is not to say there aren’t pleasures to be had, only that these are less full meals than amuse-bouches served at a tastefully-set party to which you weren’t necessarily invited.

SDAFF ’21: Time

November 10, 20212021, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Hong Kong, San Diego Asian Film Festival

殺出個黃昏
***/****
starring Chung Suet-ying, Lam Suet, Patrick Tse, Petrina Fung
screenplay by Ho Ching-yi, Lam Ka-tung
directed by Ricky Ko

by Walter Chaw Ricky Ko’s Time is perched a little uneasily between broad slapstick and heartfelt melodrama, and while arguably these are the two modes that define Charlie Chaplin’s shtick, the delicateness of that balance is one explanation for why there’s pretty much only the one Charlie Chaplin. Its Chinese title meaning something like “take a hit out on twilight,” Ko’s flick opens with some throwback Hong Kong action as a trio of hired killers show their stuff in colourful, comic-book-interstitial-aided, ’70s-era vignettes: the master of the Karambit Knife, the master of the barbed chain-whip, the portly getaway driver/comic relief–roles each played at some point in their prolific careers by Hong Kong legends Patrick Tse, Petrina Fung Bo-Bo, and Lam Suet, reprised here after a fashion as the film flashes forward to catch up with them well into their dotage. Chau (Tse) uses his knife skills now to slowly, very slowly, slice noodles into broth at a hole-in-the-wall cafe; Fung (Bo-Bo) fronts a lounge act at a geriatric disco; and Chung (Lam) whiles away his hours in the company of an in-call prostitute he hopes one day to marry. Fung’s the only one of them, really, who isn’t all but waiting to die. When Chau gets replaced by a noodle-making robot, Fung offers him a job–a hit, in fact, a last call to glory that Chau answers by practicing his knifing on a log. He’s still got it: slowed considerably, but not squeamish about murder for hire. Turns out, his target is an old woman who just wants to get it over with.

SDAFF ’21: Catch the Fair One

November 7, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, Revenge, San Diego Asian Film Festival, Thriller

***½/****
starring Kali Reis, Tiffany Chu, Michael Drayer, Kevin Dunn
screenplay by Josef Kubota Wladyka
directed by Josef Kubota Wladyka

by Walter Chaw Hyphenate Josef Kubota Wladyka follows his Colombian drug-trafficking adventure film Dirty Hands with the concussive, propulsive sex-trafficking thriller Catch the Fair One, announcing himself as an artist with the chops to handle an efficient action vehicle that functions as a vibrant social statement, too. It’s a rich, angry work that has not a hint of sentimentality to it nor an ounce of fat on it. The uncharitable would maybe call it too straightforward: a march, brutish and uninterrupted, with a message that’s more like a klaxon than a statement–but the picture is admirable for its unwillingness to gild the intensely ugly lily of vanished Native American women and white law enforcement’s utter lack of interest in doing anything about this epidemic. Kali Reis collaborated on the story, a personal one for her as one of the most visible spokespeople for the MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women) movement–visible because, as a boxer, she’s the WBA super lightweight world champion.

SDAFF ’21: 7 Days

November 7, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Romance, San Diego Asian Film Festival

**½/****
starring Geraldine Viswanathan, Karan Soni, Gita Reddy, Zenobia Shroff
written by Roshan Sethi & Karan Soni
directed by Roshan Sethi

by Walter Chaw Roshan Sethi’s 7 Days is a charmer. It opens like When Harry Met Sally… with interviews of real couples at different stages in their relationships talking about how they met and how they’re getting along. In this incarnation, the couples all appear to be desi, and the common theme that binds them is their arranged marriages. They set the stage for this story of traditional cultures trying to maintain in the diaspora, of how a young generation of desi struggle with the pull of tradition versus the siren’s call of assimilation. I don’t use this metaphor loosely: assimilation is a kind of death. If it results in rebirth, so be it, but a thing dies in the process of that renaissance and I’m no longer certain that the transformation is necessary or, if it’s necessary, worth it. The rewards fall far short of the price one pays for surrendering something so valuable as a cultural lineage, an identity beyond the one provided by an adopted culture that would prefer you edgeless and easy to compartmentalize.

SDAFF ’21: Drive My Car

November 4, 2021****/****, 2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Japan, San Diego Asian Film Festival

ドライブ・マイ・カー
****/****
starring Hidetoshi Nishijima, Masaki Okada, Reika Kirishima, Tôko Miura
screenplay by Ryûsuke Hamaguchi & Takamasa Oe, based on the short story by Haruki Murakami
directed by Ryûsuke Hamaguchi

by Walter Chaw Haruki Murakami’s short story “Drive My Car” is a model of the rich economy that typifies his writing. The prose–inasmuch as I can tell from its English translation–is simple and declarative, and the action, such as it is, is mundane. But that simplicity is akin to the “Drink Me/Eat Me” invitations presented to Alice on the outskirts of Wonderland–the Red Pill/Blue Pill keys to entire landscapes littered with signs and referents pointing to the things Murakami was thinking (of) as he was writing, possibly even to what he was reading immediately before setting pen to paper. Midway through the short story, the protagonist, Kafuku (a homonym for Kafka), a small-time stage actor who has had to hire a driver because of a drunk-driving accident, mentions his love of zoning out to Beethoven–or, on occasion, American soft rock–on the way home from the theatre. On the way in? He listens to a cassette of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya”, the play in which he’s playing the lead role. Some days, he’ll close his eyes and try to catch his driver, a young woman called Misaki, shifting gears on his 12-year-old yellow Saab. As Murakami describes it, Misaki is such a good driver that Kafuku can only tell gears are being changed by the engine’s sound, which he compares to an insect flying nearer, then away, then back again.