NZIFF 2019 - Off the Beaten Track

Dan Slevin delves deeper into the 2019 film festival programme.

A few weeks ago, when the full NZIFF programme was released, I pronounced it “maybe the finest, deepest programme I have experienced.”

I may have been premature.

The headline films are extraordinarily on point and of the moment.

Only the new Almodóvar (Pain & Glory), The Souvenir (a masterpiece from former festival favourite Joanna Hogg), Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (in cinemas now), Midsommar (a welcome late addition to the festival now that its commercial release has been delayed to Halloween), and The Last Black Man in San Francisco  (an extremely well-reviewed drama about gentrification and race) are obviously missing from the big names that we might have expected.

The printed programme goes on for pages and pages of films that command our attention but challenge our timekeeping. On my second rotation through the programme, looking for the smaller and less-heralded pictures – those hidden gems that make the festival a much more personal journey than the mass-marketed ‘hero’ pictures – I found my pickings were slimmer. There is still quality to be found, don’t get me wrong, but the odds of landing on a classic aren’t as good as previous years.

The festival generously made some previews available to me but some of the other films I managed to find through other – legitimate – channels.

Under the Silver Lake

The biggest disappointment was the much-heralded LA neo-noir, Under the Silver Lake. Despite the fact that it was inspired by many of my – and others – favourite films, but located fairly, squarely and desperately in an alienated modern day, this film failed to make a connection with me no matter how hard it tried.

Andrew Garfield is a handsome loser – strangely attractive to random lonely women – who is jolted out of his stupor by the possibility of a conspiracy. His beautiful, flirtatious, neighbour has mysteriously disappeared, and every step of his amateur investigation takes him deeper into a world of mega-rich, libertarian, people-traffickers and a Hollywood than enables these people because it needs their money.

Stylish and beautifully played by all, I was left cold by a film that seemed more inspired by its references than by real life. A film school education should be a bonus when watching a movie not a requirement.

Koyaanisqatsi

I was intrigued by the inclusion of Koyaanisqatsi in the retro section of the programme. For those of us of a certain age, it was the essential 80s stoner film – Friday nights at the Paramount with Philip Glass’s score turned way up loud. I pulled out my (at the time) expensive Blu-ray of the film to see whether it was how I remembered it and can see how the film would benefit from a modern remastering. Even in HD, my version looked rough around the edges and the scratches and glitches will be fixed in this new version I’m sure.

What intrigued me – showing it to the teenagers in the house – was how Godfrey Reggio’s nightmarish vision of a modern world so thoroughly disconnected from our spiritual and temporal sources, 35-years on didn’t seem quite so bad. In fact, I felt a little nostalgic for relatively empty freeways, cities full of people who weren’t on their phones all the time and factories full of people who had actual jobs making things. They probably had unions and contracts and all that jazz.

Those were the days, eh?

Martha: A Picture Story

The documentary, Martha: A Picture Story was one of those lovely experiences where you go in knowing nothing and come out fuller, somehow, even though the film itself adheres closely to standard documentary norms – the final act reveal is as closely held in documentary as it is in fiction.

New York photographer Martha Cooper’s great lesson for all of us, I reckon, is her relentless cheery good humour in the face of some utterly unreasonable obstacles and – later in life – enthusiastic fans who still don’t seem to get who it is they are fan of.

Cooper started out as a news photographer but her eye kept being drawn to what was on the fringes of the scenes she was sent to shoot. This led her to the outer boroughs of New York and the graffiti scene (an extraordinary flowering of creativity simultaneous with the birth of hip-hop) and she became the unofficial chronicler of that amazing and influential paint can street art – an art that nobody in power wanted to acknowledge as legitimate.

Knife+Heart

The Incredibly Strange section of the festival is always the biggest ‘roll the dice’ section and the wins will often be worth the gamble. Yann Gonzalez’s Knife+Heart is a difficult but ultimately heart-warming watch: a serial killer is on the loose in 1970s Paris, targeting performers in the underground gay porno scene. (Straight porn in France in this period was so legitimate it received a form of government subsidy.)

Vanessa Paradis plays the producer/director of these films –the mother figure for her beleaguered company – and she attempts to discover who the killer is while at the same time restore her relationship with editor Lois (Kate Moran).

It’s graphic but quite sweet.

MO TE IWI: Carving for the People

Robin Greenberg’s MO TE IWI – Carving for the People is also quite sweet but I wish it had been less so. A portrait of master carver Rangi Hetet, the film feels more celebratory than I was expecting – or that might be justified.

Hetet’s influence over more than 50 years is undeniable but I felt that the film missed an opportunity to dive a little deeper into the challenges that traditional Māori culture experienced for decades – and continues to experience – and how those challenges might be overcome.

I know that wasn’t Greenberg’s aim, so I don’t want to criticise her for not achieving it, but I had so many more unanswered questions at the end of it than I wanted.

The Wild Goose Lake

The closest thing to a genuine masterpiece I saw in previews for this festival was Diao Yinan’s The Wild Goose Lake, a Chinese noir – a Chi-noir, if you like – that holds atmosphere, social politics and superb structural control together to make something wonderful.

I missed Diao’s last picture, Black Coal, Thin Ice in the 2014 festival due to illness and I have regretted it ever since. The Wild Goose Lake makes up for it.

A gangster summit goes wrong and one of the leaders (Hu Ge) finds himself on the run, framed for a crime he didn’t commit. His enemies try and leverage his wife, not realising they have been separated for years, and the over-it femme fatale (Gwei Lun Mei) sent to find him sees an opportunity for her own advantage.

Beautiful, inspired and aware of its heritage but not beholden to it, The Wild Goose Lake is superb.

The production company is called Omnijoi and I want that to use that word as a tattoo.

Beanpole

Also superb, but a much harder film to pitch for, is Beanpole, set in the early days of post-WWII Leningrad. We all know how Russia suffered in that war – at least I hope we do – and in Beanpole we see a traumatised nurse (her nickname is Beanpole because she is of Brienne of Tarth dimensions) try and navigate the post-war horror with her best friend, Masha (a veteran with the medals and the scars to prove it).

Masha returns to be with her son, Pashka, who she left with Beanpole. But Pashka is nowhere to be found.

Beanpole is heavy duty but worth it and – you know that cliché “every frame a painting”? Every frame is, indeed, a painting. Beautiful and terrible.

Ruben Brandt, Collector

Talking of paintings, Ruben Brandt, Collector is an odd fish. The character Ruben Brandt is a therapist specialising in criminal psychology but his own dreams are haunted by modernist art. The solution? Employ his criminal clients to steal that art as part of their therapy.

If that sounds suitably bonkers, you will appreciate Milorad Krstic’s zany animated trip through the great galleries of Europe – where everyone is Cubist. Like, literally everyone.

If you can get past the central aesthetic conceit – not an easy assumption – you then have to trust the slightly questionable voice work but there’s no denying that Ruben Brandt is not an exciting addition to the world of modern animation. The more art you can spot, the more your appreciation will be greatly enhanced, but the pizazz of the animation carries the rest of us along regardless.

The New Zealand International Film Festival opens in Auckland on 18 July and versions of it make their way around 12 other centres until 18 September. Details of all the titles (including ratings where they are known) can be found at the NZIFF website. There are three more capsule reviews by Dan for this year’s festival here.