The NZIFF’s final weekend is bittersweet. On one hand, the end’s in sight: no more bad food (lol), no more bleeding your bank account (lol). On the other hand, the movies are gonna stop, and that sucks. So yeah. Bittersweet.
My first film of the final weekend fit that description. Two Days, One Night is my second round with Belgian naturalists the Dardenne brothers; my first, The Kid With The Bike, rolled off me with a shrug in 2011, but I’ve reason to believe this was The Wrong Reaction. I say this because Two Days, One Night provoked a range of visceral reactions in me: pit-in-the-gut anger at modern capitalism; deep sadness for those it victimises; determination to not treat those injustices as inevitable. It stirred up all this anger and hope. It certainly did not make me shrug.
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As Charlie’s Country surveys the Aboriginal experience, the Dardennes survey our messed-up modern philosophy of human capital through a lone figure struggling against it. Marion Cotillard takes the Gulpilil role here, and I can only confirm Judah’s assessment of her enormously empathetic, open performance. Sandra’s weekend is a series of tough battles against desperation and self-interest, and Cotillard captures the ebbs and flows of her resolve with sensitivity and restraint. It’s only enhanced by the honest, keenly-felt performances of the rest of the ensemble, all playing characters deep in their own struggles.
There’s nothing big or dramatic about the indignities Sandra suffers for no other reason than she’s a working-class woman suffering from depression, whose relationship with her employer is horrendously imbalanced. This is the world we’ve normalised: a series of dead weights to carry until you give up. Two Days, One Night communicates that with respect and empathy, showing us how capitalist structures disempower people and giving us an idea of how we as individuals can resist them.
Gerard Johnstone’s Housebound is a different prospect entirely. Johnstone’s more interested in craft, in building the perfect thrill ride – which isn’t a bad thing! It’s been donkeys’ years since I’ve had this much fun with a horror film (the last one was probably Final Destination 3). After a rushed opening that’s all about getting the board set up, Housebound settles into a playful, unpredictable rhythm. In particular, the editing and the old-school Hammer Horror score play off each other with sly humour, constantly wrong-footing the audience to build to asynchronous punchlines.
Erewhon hypnotises you, drawing you into a (sometimes laboured) narrative of radical inversion and natural exploitation.
It’s the performances that give Housebound so much of its irreverent energy. Morgana O’Reilly’s perpetual scowl is a great counterpoint to the film's mania; Rima te Wiata owns scene after scene as a boomer mother who has to fill every space with her voice; and Glen-Paul Waru offsets their strong personalities with deadpan earnestness, like a stubborn kid playing ghost hunter.
In the Q&A following his visual essay Erewhon, New Zealand artist Gavin Hipkins described it as being “like science fiction”. That’s a pretty good call, from where I’m sitting; like Ron Fricke’s recent visual essay Samsara, Hipkins makes nature and technology unreal, distant from our own experiences.
The title comes from Samuel Butler’s 1874 satire, about an entrepreneurial Brit who travels to a distant land and encounters a community of people who have abandoned their industrial advances. The book’s prose, given haunting life by narrator Mia Blake, is read over images of grand, intimidating landscapes and abandoned technology: rusting cars, empty buildings, robots left alone to walk. Stillness dominates, motion only ever intruding into the frame or hiding at the edges. Moving from one image to the next at a steady pace, Erewhon hypnotises you, drawing you into a (sometimes laboured) narrative of radical inversion and natural exploitation.
The Tale of Princess Kaguya makes for melancholy watching after The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness last weekend, which suggested it could be Studio Ghibli’s final film – but it’s a hell of a note to go out on. Isao Takahata’s adaptation of the Japanese myth of the bamboo cutter is visually astonishing, its art style a unique amalgam of Japanese sumi-e and nanga, all single strokes and water-coloured landscapes. It builds the story’s mythic quality and creates incredible, one-of-a-kind moments of emotive animation: lines blur and stretch as Kaguya is consumed with anger, and strong bright colours fill in the frame in moments of exquisite escape.
The story follows in the footsteps of Takahata’s Pom Poko, showing a deep affinity for the simplicity of nature and a similarly deep resentment towards those who pull us away from it. Kaguya is most joyous among the birds and bees and beasts, but she's constantly told she's destined for other, ostensibly better things. Out of that, Takahata weaves a delicate tale of the tensions between adolescent wishes and the arrogant expectations of those who 'know better', finding its villain in that arrogance and its hero in a savvy, fish-out-of-water princess who’s better-realised than any in the Disney canon.
Voices of the Land: Ngā Reo o te Whenua finds its own connection with the land through the music of taonga pūoro, traditional Maori instruments we'd understand better were it not for the ravages of colonisation and the passage of time. The film explores the revival and restoration of taonga pūoro through the experiences of prominent musicologist Richard Nunns, an eloquent and generous man whose work with Hirini Melbourne and Horomona Horo is invaluable to our understanding of the instruments and the stories they tell. There’s also plenty of footage of Nunns and Horo ‘playing to the land’, using the landscape as a scoresheet and producing captivating, ethereal melodies.
Director Paul Wolffram and his team capture Nunns’ philosophy of performance in the film’s own look and rhythm. The film frequently cuts to images of undisturbed nature and plays with their speed, boosts the levels of individual sounds, mixes in the music of the taonga, all to find and enhance the natural rhythm of the land. It's a consistently impressive exercise in editing and sound design, using form to build our understanding of taonga pūoro in new and enchanting ways.
One of the first films I saw this Festival, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Winter Sleep, finds a companion piece in the chilly Ibsen-esque Russian drama Leviathan. Kolya’s a hothead appealing against a local council decision to seize his land. Over 140 minutes, his life falls apart and people occasionally him and his associates what they believe in, as if faith will save him. Full of vodka, rifles and misery, it's almost a stereotype of Russian realism. Its worth, though, is in its nuanced portrayal of people suffering under their own powerlessness, four fundamentally decent folk wrestling against a violent, dispassionate world. Andrey Zvyagintsev’s landscapes are desolate and cold, filled with symbols of economic hopelessness; the cast are experts at anguish, Yelena Lyadova standing out as Kolya’s enigmatic, alienated wife.
they all share a gluttony for punishment, finding the stupid and the brilliant in ostentatious people doing terrible things
Where Leviathan is less effective is in its depiction of institutional rot in modern Russia. During a drinking party in the mountains, two police officers flick through framed photo portraits of former Russian leaders they intend to use for target practice, laughing and joking about how they're missing Yeltsin's portrait. It's a pointed and complicated metaphor for Russia's relationship with corruption and overbearing statism, far more effective than the shades-of-black villainy elsewhere. The only thing distinguishing boorish mayor Vadim from The Departed’s Frank Costello is that he’s an elected representative; the same goes for the state at large. Perhaps this criticism’s a bit perverse, but Kolya’s family drama is so rich in its exploration of eroded humanity that Leviathan’s jeremiad stands out for refusing complexity.
I end with Wild Tales, Damián Szifrón’s anthology of shorts about inflamed ids running rampant and destroying all in their path. While all six shorts strike different tones (La propuesta’s deadpan criminal drama, for example, is a world away from the cartoon violence of El más fuerte), they all share a gluttony for punishment, finding the stupid and the brilliant in ostentatious people doing terrible things (whether or not they suffer for it). If it shares the spirit of anything in this world, it’s Itchy and Scratchy: absurd violence, be it verbal or physical, brought to life with bright colours and entertaining performers. I cackled all the way through it – that seemed more appropriate than garden-variety laughter.
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