Holding The Man | (Australia, 2015) | Melbourne International Film Festival | Broadsheet
Both book and film are unflinching in the face of the grim - and at times graphic - medical realities of HIV/AIDS, a strange focus for a love story. Stott agrees “The book is a very graphic dissection of what it is to die, and the physical process of dying,” he says. “But that’s just as much a part of the story as the love is, in the same way that love is just as much a part of the suffering.”
7 Chinese Brothers | (USA, 2015) | Melbourne International Film Festival | the AU review
Much of the comedy feels like off-the-cuff material from Schwartzman, the spontaneity of which would have worked in the film’s favour if it didn’t also feel like he was simply working the volume angle, throwing plenty of material at a wall and hoping at least some of it will stick; very little of it does and eventually we stop caring anyway.
Appropriate Behaviour | (USA, 2014) Sydney International Film Festival | the AU review
Played with deadpan composure by writer and feature debut director Desiree Akhavan, we meet Shirin in the last stage of her breakup with long-term girlfriend, Maxine (Rebecca Henderson). In the opening scene she is collecting her remaining belongings, exchanging final barbs and discussing the future custody of a shared strap-on dildo. The scene closes on Shirin walking down a street with said relationship artefact dangling jauntily from her hand.
Palo Alto | (USA, 2013) | the AU review
And while it’s mostly familiar teen-flick territory in terms of its characters, the film’s direction places a lot of responsibility in its young actors to develop these teen archetypes beyond a single-dimension – and they deliver. The full-scale awkwardness is captured in averted eyes, slighty-too-long silences and the genuine sense that part of being a teenager is playing a role, and then not knowing how or where to stop.
Coming Forth by Day | (Egypt, 2013 | Melbourne International Film Festival | the AU review
Subverting ideas around patriarchy and power, the father’s post-stroke inertia dominates the lives of the two women, even while he is completely dependent on them, and they are bound by a strict sense of duty that appears to be both cultural and self-imposed. Requiring their constant attention, the two women tend painstakingly to his needs, cleaning, feeding and changing his soiled clothes, a routine of such brutal honesty as to create an unbearably visceral audience experience of sickness and stagnation.
Israel: a Home Movie | (Israel, 2012) AICE Israeli Film Festival | the AU review
The footage itself is dazzling. An archival treasure of mint condition 8mm, 16mm and Super-8 film, both nostalgic and confronting; footage from the 1930s showing early Jewish arrivals, the trauma of Holocaust survivors in Israel, the absorption of Jewish immigrants through the 50s, the euphoria of the end of the ‘67 war, and a camping trip gone awry as Syria makes a surprise attack on Yom Kippur in 1973. But also, all the familiar joys of family and life: weddings, birthdays, potty training and playing in the backyard. This is footage salvaged from cellars and attics, pieced together in a rich mosaic to tell a seamless narrative of the fledgling state of Israel.
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia | (Turkey, 2011) Darwin International Film Festival | the AU review
Shot in long, unbroken single-takes, the trance-like tension is broken with the occasional thickening of plot when subtle but shocking details of the characters’ lives are revealed, only to slip quietly away amid long, existential moments of characters staring into the middle distance.
On the Road | (USA, 2012) Darwin International Film Festival | the AU review
This is the full technicolor Beat experience: the insatiable Dean Moriarty is painted in full potency – a blazing inferno of Pied Piper-like charisma, living life at full speed, full throttle and full volume. Scat-paced, burning bright and short, he's a maddeningly unreliable narcissist ready to leave his wife, his babies, his most loved companions on a selfish, hedonistic whim.
It is as if by sheer sleight of hand that we suspend disbelief long enough to accept the larger than life character before us - how does an adult woman find herself in these situations? Can the ingénue shtick be real? But the device actually reveals more than it hides; entering Katz’ world casts a very particular magic over things, and she reminds us that performance and story telling are profound acts of intimacy.
10,000km | (Spain/USA, 2014) Melbourne International Film Festival | the AU review
Littered with casual examples of the way that technology infiltrates our intimate relationships, the film examines the chasm between the virtual and the real with plenty of relatable examples.
It Felt Like Love | (USA, 2012) Melbourne International Film Festival | the AU review
As with a lot of independent cinema – and, indeed, debut features – the film is a meditation, making use of the visual experience of cinema over dialogue-driven narrative. This approach makes the film a slow burn, but in its relatively short 82 minutes, creates an incredibly moving emotional palette. It’s the rich visual minutiae that give the plot its potency
Ballad of a Weeping Spring | (Israel, 2012) AICE Israeli Film Festival | the AU review
Steeped in the spell-binding music of the Middle East, known in Israel simply as, Mizrachi (Eastern), what ensues is a buddy-film, road movie, getting-the-band-back-together piece of cinema, heavy on genre borrowing from mid-century cowboy flicks, to form a genre new to Israeli cinema, nicknamed, I am so happy to report, the ‘Felafel Western’.
Your Sister's Sister | (USA, 2012) Darwin International Film Festival | the AU review
While occasionally veering dangerously close to too-familiar territory, what elevates this rendering of the formula above the ho-hum, is the delightful frisson between the actors. It’s a talk-heavy film with a partly improvised feel, and the characters’ interplay – natural and dynamic, like the conversations you might be having if you were an extremely cool, funny, comfortably neurotic 20-something from Seattle – is the glue for what might have otherwise been pretty standard and plays up the characters’ flaws and anxieties to gorgeously comic effect.
Beauty | (South Africa, 2012) Darwin International Film Festival | the AU review
The drama of the film is caught up in its slow tempo that builds to a shocking crescendo. Lots of astoundingly banal domestic scenes with conversations between husband and wife about cleaning the pool and the family business are scattered with long mid-close ups of Francois’ face and eyes (incidentally, startling close together, like a bird of prey) observing Christian, and casual cuts to François’ secret life, its carnality depicted with bleak realism. The palpable, understated tension of each shot bubbles diabolically beneath the surface, and when the film explodes in a shocking climax, it comes with a visceral shock that is set to change everything. That it doesn’t change anything is the film’s biggest shock, revealing a truly sinister rumination on power.
What could have settled for being a neat little 101 primer of second wave feminist history instead confronts and teases out the complexities that the movement faced, even within itself, revealing a host of growing pains in its attempt to encompass the myriad female experience.
Having a series of films covering the same story is an inspired idea, and Benson uses this conceit to recreate scenes that differ both subtly and drastically in each telling. It speaks to the very idea of memory and perspective that two people should conceive of any given moment in such radically different ways, and makes for a very cool film device for channelling their inner worlds.
Diary of a Teenage Girl | (USA, 2015) Melbourne International Film Festival | the AU review
Minnie is fearless, experimental and ravenous for experience in an era when sexual politics were fast and loose. She’s free loving, unguarded (to the point of recklessness, really) and insightfully precocious – think Juno, Paper Towns, Me, Earl and the Dying Girl, but way more confronting. As Minnie follows her impulses – and not just with the doomed sexual relationship with Monroe – things take a swift and dark turn.
Farewell my Queen | (France, 2012) Darwin International Film Festival | the AU review
The palpable glamour and grime of the period unfolds on the precipice of revolution, with dead rats, sewers and disaffected citizens set against the opulence, finery and creamy décolletages of the royal court. But when the shocking news of the storming of the Bastille reaches the walls, deserters and traitors abound, and as heads are set to roll, the Queen’s legendary self-obsession and maddening lack of perspective comes to the fore as she frets about embroidery and jewels with an era crumbling around her.
The Flowers of War | (USA/China, 2011) Darwin International Film Festival | the AU review
While Yimou is an acclaimed Chinese director, producer, screen writer and actor, Flowers is painted heavily with the Hollywood brush, employing deafening cliché and wince-worthy platitudes to make its point. Played without much depth by Bale, Miller’s abrupt and valiant about-face – from dressing as a priest for a drunken lark, to sobering up enough to impersonate one – smacks of ‘the accidental hero’ formula, and ham-fisted dialogue that wades into sluggish exposition (“I’m not a priest! I’m not a priest! I’m not!”), is a signature move for a filmmaker that doesn’t completely trust his audience. A series of spoon-fed sentimental moments, flat characters and mostly implausible plot lines are others.
Lore | (Australia/Germany, 2012) Darwin International Film Festival | the AU review
Tense and beautiful, the drama of the film forms a restrained tableau of a German springtime in full bloom, with stunning impressionistic cinematography portraying the aftermath of war: death, lice and rape, hunger and mud. Each and every shot works in still-frame as a piece of photographic art fit for a gallery wall, and the result is a stunning fusion of beauty and death.