I was lucky enough to catch 6 films at this, my first ever film festival. The sheer number of films on offer was a little dizzying, and I would have loved to have caught even more if time and money had allowed it. I had a ticket booked to see Olivier Assayas’s Personal Shopper, which I was really looking forward to but sadly couldn’t make in time after work. But the films I saw gave a small glimpse of the sheer range of films available, and I loved the breadth of content, quality and experiences even this small number of films offered. Here are some quick thoughts in the order I saw them.
Ten Years (Ng Ka-Leung, Jevons Au, Chow Kwun-Wai, Fei-Pang Wong, Kwok Zune; Hong Kong; 2015)
Local Egg from Ten Years
My first film was one of the most unusual: a portmanteau of five short films, all offering differing interpretations of how the directors imagine Hong Kong to be in 2025. The varied approaches they all take are fascinating, and the final result is undeniably incendiary and stirring, even for someone like me who knows little about the current situation in the region. The real-life story surrounding the film is just as compelling as the film itself. Made on a shoestring budget and released in only one cinema in Hong Kong, word of mouth quickly spread and the film became a sleeper hit, often selling more tickets than the new Star Wars film in many cinemas. The film was nominated for Best Picture at the Hong Kong Film Awards, and ultimately won, but all mentions of the film in the media were blocked by the Chinese government and the award itself from the ceremony was cut from all TV broadcasts.
In a way, this true scenario serves to further enforce the radical messages of the film. This was a compelling protest film, and all the different approaches create a more complete and varied picture than a single narrative could. One film, Season of the End, which depicted a couple collecting and preserving specimens from homes which had been demolished, felt jarringly out of place from the others, perhaps because it took a far more abstract approach, and because it focused entirely on the couple at the expense of the wider story. The opening film though, Extras, takes an unusual but intriguing approach, depicting a government-backed assassination of two major Hong Kong political party leaders from the point of view of both the bickering politicians debating how best to set-up the attack for maximum impact so as to push through draconian security measures, to the two men, the pawns, tasked with carrying out the executions.
Lighter but equally informative and thought-provoking takes come from films Dialect, depicting a taxi driver struggling to work following a new law forcing drivers to speak only Mandarin instead of Cantonese, and Local Egg, which shows how the government-backed closure of the last chicken farm in Hong Kong affects the family of a shopkeeper, primarily the father trying to keep his son questioning of all propaganda. The real standout for me though was Self Immolator, which cleverly combines the story of student protestors with a faux documentary, offering perhaps the most explicitly emotive and political call-to-arms.
That many of these films found inspiration for their stories from real-life laws and scenarios makes the work even more compelling in hindsight. This is political cinema where perhaps its greatest impact is in its interaction with the outside world, far more so than the film within itself. It’s also a testament to the potential for independent filmmaking to really go beyond the walls of the cinema screen and start to creep out, perhaps to cause meaningful change. This was a unique and insightful film, and I was very glad I had the chance to see it.
King Cobra (Justin Kelly; USA; 2016)
As far as I know, this is one of the few (if only) films I’m aware of which deals with porn in the Internet age. Drawing much from that cinematic bastion of porn industry exposés, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights, King Cobra similarly takes a tragicomic approach to the constantly wavering highs and lows of the lost souls, young upstarts and sex-crazed fiends that seemingly make up the entire porn industry.
King Cobra is a biopic of the real life scandal involving gay porn star Brent Corrigan aka Sean Lockhart and the producer who first discovered him, Bryan Kocis (named Stephen in the film, and played very well by an against-type Christian Slater). Garrett Clayton plays Lockhart, desperate to escape from his mom’s house in San Diego and so makes the move to Los Angeles to work with Stephen, a closeted producer who runs Cobra Video productions from his non-descript suburban home, filming videos in his basement. The newly baptised Brent Corrigan soon becomes an Internet hit, causing him to realise Stephen might not be offering him the fairest of deals, with him being one in a series of young men Stephen has recruited to live out his masturbatory fantasies in the safety of his home. Meanwhile, producer Joe (James Franco) and his boyfriend Harlow (Keegan Allen) from rival production company Viper Boyz have their eye on Brent, and will do anything possible to get him to join them.
For a film which dealt with some quite serious subjects, including hints towards exploitation and child abuse, I admired how King Cobra was able to maintain such a darkly comic tone without feeling like it was exploiting or trivialising the issues. The performances are strong, from Clayton’s careful balance of youthful naiveté and self-awareness, to Allen’s taut edgy physicality, hinting at a tension between violence and a desperation for affection. This plays out best in the bristling energy of his relationship with Franco’s Joe, here played with a similar outlandishness to his role as Alien in Spring Breakers. Less cartoonish than that film, but drawn to similarly overblown outbursts, it’s clear Franco is having a lot of fun with the role.
It’s insightful how director Justin Kelly realises how the four main leads have used porn and its performative and intimate nature to make up for lacks in their lives, and to explore the boundaries of the shame some have for their own homosexuality. Saying that, in some ways King Cobra is a slight film, with stylistic tics and fast pacing often drawing away from moments which could offer greater insights into the characters. It clearly is aiming for a neon-drenched exposé of underground culture a la Spring Breakers, with similar salacious content and synthy soundtrack, but sometimes can’t decide between going for the quieter plot-driven moments or the flashier set-ups. Overall though, I found this to be a gleefully enjoyable thrill, especially for being so completely fearless in topics which would so often be softened by film studios. Throw in some frankly extraordinary cameos by Alicia Silverstone and Molly Ringwald (Justin Kelly must clearly have loved having these figures of 80s/90s nostalgia on only his second feature) and you get something very fun, if a bit forgettable.
Heal the Living (Katell Quillévéré; France/Belgium; 2016)
I went into my third film knowing very little beyond the basic topic it focuses on. I hadn’t heard of the director or seen any of her films. But I was really blown away by how sublime, how deeply moving and humane this film was. It was fantastically shot as well, with a real insightful eye for detail and some particularly impressive scenes, especially an early scene of surfing.
The film centres on various seemingly unrelated stories, all involving the ethically and emotionally fraught issue of organ donations and transplants. Heal the Living is an unassuming and uncomplicated film, but Quillévéré achieves this by taking multiple complex and interrelated strands and allowing them to play out in their own simple but observant fashion. The film takes its time, and this grants us a wonderful insight into the lives, backgrounds and quirks of all the characters, including even minor roles which feature minimally. There are little moments, some funny and some even a little fantastical, which give even background characters just little hints of depth amongst the frenetic activity of the busy hospital. It’s also helped by a fantastic cast including Anne Dorval, Emmanuelle Seigner and Tahar Rahim, who all give truthful, nuanced performances.
This isn’t a film particularly driven by high drama or tension. It simply offers a surprisingly universal portrait of perceptions of our own mortality, and of the fragility of the human body. At times the film has an almost documentary-like approach in depicting the processes of an organ transplant, most specifically in the surgery and transportation. This is a topic which I can’t really remember having featured in cinema much, bar some scenes in Almodóvar’s All About My Mother, which is surprising, considering it offers the potential for a number of dramatic scenarios. But what I really respected about Heal the Living was how it avoided overblown melodrama and instead offered an unassuming, realistic glimpse into the lives of families simply surviving amidst personal tragedies and health scares, and this for me made it a far more engaging and immersive. This was genuinely one of the best films I’ve seen this year, and in a lot of ways, I thought it was genuinely very special indeed.
The Dreamed Ones (Ruth Beckermann; Austria; 2016)
This was a spur-of-the-moment choice when I had a free afternoon, and I went in knowing absolutely nothing. I probably wasn’t in the right mood for it, but in the end I found the film to be a bit of a drag, visually uninspired and with material which I personally didn’t find compelling, even over a relatively slight 90 minutes.
The Dreamed Ones is essentially an essay film with documentary elements, depicting two decades of correspondence between two post-war writers who met in 1948: poet Paul Celan who had survived the concentration camps, and Ingeborg Bachmann, whose father was a Nazi. They hardly met, but maintained a regular impassioned, often tempestuous relationship through their letters. The film dramatizes these letters by having two actors (Anja Plaschg and Laurence Rupp) read them aloud chronologically in a recording studio, often filmed in tight close ups focused on their faces. There are glimpses of their downtime between recordings, often sharing cigarette breaks and discussing their interpretations of the letters. But the film never strays from the correspondence, and barely even leaves the recording studio, a relatively blank space.
The letters were fairly intriguing at first, with the obvious flourishes of language and phrase that would come from two writers finding inspiration in each other. But I quickly found myself tiring of their self-contained woes, which I struggled to find any engagement with. I could tell others in the audience with me were getting far more involved than I could, but I got bored fairly quickly. I was hoping there could have been more focus on how the reading of the letters and their close proximity would have affected the relationship between the two actors, but nothing ultimately comes from it, perhaps with the filmmakers not wanting to intrude upon the real-life story. In the end, I couldn’t see what differentiated this film from what could easily just have been an audio recording of the letters, as that is ultimately what it became.
The Wailing (Na Hong-jin; South Korea; 2016)
I chose this film purely on the strength of having loved director Na Hong-jin’s debut film The Chaser, a breathtakingly intense and brutal police thriller, and for the dizzying promise of seeing him tackle something a bit more fantastical. Frankly, I think this film is an epic achievement in all senses of the word. At two and a half hours long, it certainly takes advantage of its vast running time. It throws everything it has at the screen and then some, and thankfully, most of it sticks.
The Wailing is a slightly unholy blend of genres which frankly shouldn’t work but it just about gets away with it. It begins in similar territory as his previous work, with a competent but bumbling police detective in a small rural village on the edge of a vast forest investigating a bizarre murder, with the culprit found in a seemingly zombie-like trance. This kickstarts a series of disturbing deaths, with theories and accusations running wild and fears that the village has been cursed. From here, The Wailing shifts into a chillingly effective 21st century take on The Exorcist, with some deafeningly visceral takes on supernatural ritual which provide a satisfyingly grounded counterpoint to the more ridiculous moments of that horror classic.
What really impressed was the sheer level of control Hong-jin has over the construction of this film. It’s obvious a lot of time and thought went into staging the shots and building the scenarios to create maximum impact; the editing is impeccable and the slow build in the first hour or so possessed some of the most genuinely creepy moments I’ve watched in a long time, with subtly effective jump scares and an overwhelming feeling of dread. But what surprises is how the shifts in tone never feel jarring. The film is surprisingly funny, and even manages to find humour in setting up potential scares. But even where the wild shifts in genre and weight of content threaten to overwhelm the film, it never loosens its grip on you. The film is heavy with so many themes (deep rooted xenophobia; the clash of religions and beliefs; questions over how realistic/allegorical the supernatural elements are) and subplots that it threatens to drag the second half down. Indeed, it almost gets lost amidst all of its twists, many of which admittedly caught me by surprise, that it did leave me wishing it retained some of the tautness of the first hour.
But I think it’s testament to the sheer level of skill involved both in front of and behind the camera that The Wailing pummels like a jackhammer. It’s vast, overblown and completely batshit crazy but also achingly tense and mysterious, and the long runtime seemed to fly by. A lot of this review does feel hyperbolic, but I think that’s the easiest way of conveying how drastically I was involved with this film. It may not be perfect, but I think it’s got to be up there as one of the best horror films I’ve ever seen.
Staying Vertical (Alain Guiraudie; France; 2016)
I don’t really even know where to begin with this one. Guiraudie’s follow up to the mesmeric and magisterial Stranger by the Lake is certainly a mixed affair, content to drift along on its own whims and fancies, presenting an unusual series of vignettes and setpieces in place of anything resembling a coherent script or character study. Similar to Stranger, Staying Vertical centres on a remote countryside setting, a fearless approach to graphic content, and a series of chance encounters for the male lead which sparks some unexpected repercussions.
We follow Leo (Damian Bonnard), an uninspired writer and filmmaker who is rambling through the French country hills. He creepily flirts with a young man (Basile Meillurat) he meets by the side of the road by offering him a part in his next movie. Duly rejected, he skulks around some more before encountering Marie (India Hair), a shepherdess tending her herd of sheep. It’s not long before the two are making out, and before we know it, he has moved into her remote farmhouse with her two sons and father. One graphic sex scene later, then a cut to an unnecessarily gory scene of childbirth, the two are almost immediately parents to a baby boy. At the same time, Leo continues to drift back and forth to a nearby town, seemingly attempting to work on a new screenplay, but making practically no effort, and making false promises to his producer on top of asking for more advances of money. Leo finds newfound love for his son, but Marie struggles with postpartum depression and makes no effort to connect to the constantly crying child.
It’s hard to really convey much more without either rambling endlessly or giving away too much. This is a film which happily flows to its own rhythm, and if you are willing to go along with it, it presents a bewildering and somewhat compelling journey. This film could easily have been a character study of a lost man finding purpose in fatherhood, but it’s hard to tell where Guiraudie’s interests really lie – certainly not something so ordinary. Leo is presented as such an unreadable character, often dour and expressionless. His writer’s block seemingly turns into such a complete disinterest in work of any kind that it’s hard to really detemine what he wants, especially as he drifts back and forth, from random re-encounters with the young man from the road and the elderly racist man he seems to cohabit with, to visits with a new-age healer who lives in a swamp. Instead, it feels like Leo is simply a blank vessel which Guiraudie utilises to introduce the increasingly surreal and metaphorical scenarios throughout the film, but put together with such dissonance that it ends up seeming like a scrapbook of ideas stitched together for no other reason than that Guiraudie found them interesting at the time.
There are some intriguing themes hinted at, primarily, gender relations and the perceived responsibilities of men and women, with several characters mentioning what they feel is the norm for differing roles of work and parenthood. The title is a reference to survival, about standing tall against the threats and low blows life has to offer. But the setting of this world seems so far gone from anything resembling reality, and Leo, the one guiding constant in this strange hodge-podge, is too empty a character to really resonate as a protagonist or emotional barometer, that the film ended up having little to no staying power with me. What really stuck is how I found this quite a cynical film, with a very unpleasant view on the nature of relationships, both sexual and familial, that it left a fairly bitter aftertaste, even for someone with a pretty unromantic view of such things like me.
Musings from a Darkened Room 