KT 078: Festival de Naarm
This week, we cover 15 films playing at the Festival de Naarm
As we approach the final weekend of MIFF 72, KT Critics from past and present have their say on some of the films in the program.
Come back next week for the official report from the editors.
Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros
Frederick Wiseman, 2023
Words by Megan Ng
Frederick Wiseman was my nonagenarian quarantine husband in the year 2020-he kept me sane and made time fly by during a lonesome two weeks in quarantine after flying back home to Kuala Lumpur. As someone who has never been moved or motivated by money, fame, or success as much as I am by food - Menus-Plasirs was purely for the gormandiser in me.
Through the Troigrois dynasty’s Michelin 3-Star restaurant and 5-star hotel in Ouches, France, we observe the gastronomic relationships of every element of the menu du jour along with the thriving ecosystem of sommeliers, cheese agers, agriculturalists, and livestock farmers. It’s hard to not be mesmerised by the chefs’ robotic concentration and neurotic finicking behind a grande cuisine caliber dish- something my dad would describe as 3 cubes of tomato and a mint garnish could very well be iteration #85 of it’s kind.
The wholesome last section of the 4 hour documentary shows Michel Troigrois interacting with guests in the dining room- make no mistake he’s doing the “just checking to see how we’re going, kitchen’s closing in 10 minutes”. He attentively engages with them, divulging in how sentimentality prevents him from truly handing over the reigns to his son, muses on how Japanese cooking techniques influences his father, him, and now his son, and this emphasises the deep connection and commitment to the art of haute cuisine throughout four generations of the Troigrois family almost like it’s genetic. In a way Menus-Plasirs draws to a close with its conception when Wiseman himself dined at the restaurant for lunch and decided this was going to be his next subject.
Showing again at ACMI 25th August at 11am.
Misericordia
Alain Guiraudie, 2024
Words by Andrew Fraser
What if your best friend only wanted to hang out with you to spend more time with your parents? And what if that friend was evil? And gay? These are the thoughts plaguing Vincent (the singular Jean-Baptiste Durand) when his ex-best friend Jeremie (an excellent Felix Kysyl) returns to the small French village of Saint-Martial, in writer-director Alain Guiraudie’s wicked new comedy Misericordia.
With hints of Pasolini’s Teorema and Clement’s Purple Noon, Jeremie is an enigmatic figure, and his motivations for his surprising homecoming are met with suspicion from Vincent, delight from Vincent’s mother, Martine (the iconic Catherine Frot), and infatuation from the local Catholic priest (Jacques Develay, hilarious), resulting in a strangely droll and highly entertaining brew of death, sex and religion. As in his previous film Stranger by the Lake, Guiraudie continues to explore his fascination with shared taboo of eroticism and criminality, exemplified in the Ripley-esque figure of Jeremie, whose unpredictable motivations and surprising sensuality make for a fascinating character study of the lengths one will go to feed their most insatiable desire – to survive.
The film is leant a fairytale like quality from the liquid amber cinematography of Claire Mathon, charging the film with a sensual energy that embraces the absurd once paired with Guiraudie’s offbeat sense of humour. Though the film follows a familiar noir set-up and structure, the film is routinely surprising thanks to the brilliant comic performances of the central ensemble and the stranger-than-fiction ways in which the characters embrace denial to serve their own desire – familiar territory for a certain kind of sexually ambiguous male. Giving yourself over to the naked pleasures of Misericordia will have you saying: Alain Guiraudie – you naughty little filmmaker.
Showing again at Hoyts Sunday 25 August
The Substance
Coralie Fargeat, 2024
Words by Armani Hollindale
‘Is there anything more unbecoming than an aging mascot’ – Vanilla Sky (2001)
Coralie Fargeat goes further still, like Hollywood, launching new stars by means of a coarse swing of the hips and an aggressive bust, creating a new love idol, when required, with a dash of vampirism. A pink star studs the ear of the young and beautiful. The needle draws a parallel to the most popular of procedures in another affective attempt to conceptualise the star as the most precious, therefore the costliest substance. Aggravating the fear of the middle-class conscience, the cinema finds salvation in violence and eroticism. Images of violence are rarely muted.
Where the writer reaches glory, the star becomes fragile, seeking divinity in their ephemeral survival; ultimately, in the mask of their double. The double awakens when the body sleeps, localised in shadows, reflections and mirrors. Desire and doubt create a passion to act out the myth inscribed by her body and face. The star needs to do nothing beyond cultivate her beauty; it lives on our substance, and we on theirs. As the provender of dreams, she is at once, both dream and reality. Both sacred and profane. A religion subject to disintegration. Exciting a projection-identification – to its end, a divinisation focused on what man knows to be the most affecting: a beautiful human face. Yet still, only providing a partial catharsis, as the stars role becomes psychotic: she polarizes and fixes obsessions beyond the existential terror of un-being to the absence of a body in which to perform a self. As the myth of the dream factory self-perpetuates, capitalism and fame create this hypertrophy, this sacred monstrosity; the star. Fargeat asks the star system to say something new, but the only change is the birth and death of the stars. Life imitates art. Kylie Jenner drops her new line of satin swimwear, plunging between firm celebrity skin.
Screening again tonight at Hoyts.
Armand
Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel, 2024
Words by Armani Hollindale
The first feature length film from Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel, grandson of Liv Ullman and Ingmar Bergman. In their very nature, Armand is at the core a devotion to the profundity of humanity. Emotions are watertight in a closed stage of melodrama set in a small primary school in Norway. A single incident reveals the futile past of a family friendship. A parent teacher meeting imitates the tension of a court-room drama, whose jury lies in the parents of the school. Here plays one of the most powerful performances from Renate Reinsve to date – with an unforgettable gesture of hysteria one must see in cinema. Descending from this fracture, the screen tilts as the temperature rises. Realism corrodes as expression takes the shape of surreal abstraction, to the point of what feels like an isolated moment of performance art.
The violence contained here mimics that of the unfolding in something like Elephant (2003). The passageways and the encounters in the setting are each unpredictable and unnerving. A rather methodological structure presents itself here, unpacking grief and trauma with a more or less logical association of emotions. Failure to cope lends itself to absurd reactions that some may grant the term, ‘subverting expectations.’ Perhaps the efficacy lies rather in the telling of a particular story, where the audience is invited into a place where the subject of conflict in the room is not there. With this particular diagram of empathy – Armand is an impressive achievement which excites a new generation of Scandinavian cinema burdened by the most powerful meditations into the struggles of the human psyche.
Us and the Night
Audrey Lam, 2024
Words by Bill Mousoulis
MIFF’s sole, token inclusion from Melbourne’s rich alt-indie film landscape, Us and the Night is a hermetic and stolid work, but still quite charming and engaging. Two girls and a library, in the still and pregnant night, going about their nocturnal jobs of cleaning the voluminous library space and sorting the endless books, the film recalls all those Akerman and Wong films with young dreamy characters drifting in the night. Our two heroines, Xiao and Umi, indeed do dream a lot in this film, seemingly stretching their work shifts out past their required hours, to have more time to look at the books or squeeze their bodies through the shelves or dance on the desks. They imagine themselves as forces, as the moon and the sea, acting on each other in mysterious ways. Individually and collectively, they conjur whole universes up, through the books they peruse, but also through their ruminating and imaginative minds (which we are graced with, through voice-overs).
It is refreshing to see such rough and scratchy 16mm. film up on the screen, rather than 16mm treated and homogenised into a clean and conventional look by filmmakers (defeating the purpose of using such a medium). Director Lam is known for using hand-crafted 16mm. in her previous work (short films), so it is pleasing she has stuck to the same aesthetic for her debut feature here. The rich soundscapes of this film also have a hand-crafted feel to them ‒ there is an intimacy with the voice-overs and a simplicity with the atmospheric sounds. Huge marks to Lam for avoiding slickness.
Overall, Us and the Night has a welcome intelligence and naivety to it, the way it captures a moment in these bright young women’s lives, a liminal moment, between today and tomorrow, and here and there.
All We Imagine As Light
Payal Kapadia, 2024
Words by Jasper Caverly
I spent the last of my meagre savings on an inner-city 2P* - and the rest the night before at an infamous late-night establishment that rhymes with Flock & Tea - and must have had my programming wires fried entering ACMI (about ten minutes late) on Monday afternoon.
Here are two truths and a lie about All We Imagine As Light.
Grand Prix winner and the first Indian feature film to compete in the main competition at Cannes in 30 years + the first ever by an Indian woman.
It’s director Payal Kapadia’s debut foray into narrative features.
The film is a lesbian road movie.
Call it a misunderstanding of the one-line synopsis but this is definitely not a lesbian road movie nor the sapphic pic I pitched to a friend (who thankfully couldn’t get a ticket**).
Lead by beautifully measured performances from Kani Kusruti (Prahba) and Divya Prahba (Anu), All We Imagine As Light is a warm portrait of two working women and their quiet yearning***.
Kapadia’s film captures Mumbai with a poetic, city-philic reverence often reserved for NYC. If the heartbeat of the Konkan is its people, then its arteries are the trains woven through the city and its voice the wind off of the Arabian sea or the monsoon downpour on tin roofs.
What really captured me was the halation-soaked cinematography and its gentle handheld camera movements motivated by the performer (typically vice versa) placing us with Prahba and Anu: sharing their lives without spectating. I look forward to seeing what Ranabir Das (Director of Photography) and Payal Kapadia do next and checking out their previous collaboration.
Footnotes:
*I have recently started paying for parking, indicative of personal growth since MIFF 71.
**Apparently at this particular sold out session the people said ENOUGH, sat wherever they wanted to, and SMASHED the allocated seating demands of the authoritarian regime at MIFF.****
***Of the heterosexual or platonic variety. Again, this is not a Thelma & Louise or Drive-Away Dolls situation.
***I am a huge supporter of the MIFF 72 program and the decision-makers in the festival team.
In Vitro
Will Howarth and Tom McKeith, 2024
Words by G.S Screebs
Within the first ten minutes of Will Howarth and Tom McKeith’s Australian sci-fi In Vitro, you can pretty easily extrapolate the next eighty minutes beat for beat. Set in a vague near-future where environmental collapse has devastated the agricultural industry (yet the constant rainfall and picturesque New South Welsh landscape doesn’t do much to help convey this idea), a couple who make a living from cloning cows on a desolate farm discover that there’s – actually, who the hell cares? Apparently I did, as my misplaced love of Australian independent cinema caused me to experience a mental breakdown in the form of excitement for this film.
It's unfortunate that the two lead actors have the same amount of skill as wet cardboard, especially given how the story leads. I’ll avoid spoilers, but let’s just say if you have half a brain you’ll be able to tell what the “cloning cows” plot point is going to lead to. To its credit, the film looks competent and professional, with the screen at ACMI 1 doing it more favours than the actual filmmaking. It’s a strong example of how making a film look good and sound good masquerade a film from actually being good.
Other than that, In Vitro’s dreams of being an A24 elevated horror event live up to nothing more than something a group of stoners in Colorado will help become the 9th most-watched film on Hulu in January 2027. I honestly wished it featured more cows.
Romulus, My Father
Richard Roxburgh, 2007
Words by Eddie Hampson
I came out of the MIFF Romulus, My Father restoration screening reminded of a classic verse. “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do”. Philip Larkin expresses in This Be The Verse the very momentous and confronting realisation for children that their parents are not what they thought – their parents are human. But this recognition is freeing; for when you accept your parents' faults you also see your own flaws, and they’re often part of your lineage.
At the press panel following the screening Raymond Gaita said, in the vein of Larkin, that most of all his book and the subsequent film directed by Richard Roxburgh are about how his parents informed his philosophy for life. After witnessing this outback Victoria coming of age story filled with so much tragedy – abuse, abandon, suicides – Gaita’s statement was almost confounding but then he spoke of hope and and intimacy. Immediately, I was reminded of the flashing glow of a lightbulb that rouses the bees to waking life at the start and end of the film and I realised that Gaita believes that intimacy and joy separates, and makes endurable, the darkest of times. And expressing dancing joy between the throes and woes of a mother who abandons him in every sense of the word is the marvellously expressive and captivating Kodi Smit-McPhee in his feature debut as Raimond. This astonishing child actor performance elevates every moment of feeling so that this film outgrows its small country setting and becomes a coming of age story for a national and global audience.
Janet Planet
Annie Baker, 2023
Words by Diana Vagas
The summer haze. Long, sticky nights. The fan merely circulating hot air. An ice cream melting onto the footpath. A seemingly endless Western Massachusetts summer that sounds like bliss, yet is tinged with melancholy for young Lacy (Zoe Ziegler); the sixth grade looms. Her mother Janet (Julianne Nicholson) is her whole world, but three adults – Janet’s boyfriend Wayne (Will Patton), old friend Regina (Sophie Okonedo), who is seeking an escape from the artist commune helmed by the charismatic, Avi (Elias Koteas) – suddenly appear in Janet's life, forcing Lacy to grapple with the idea that her mother is an imperfect person. Janet's relationships are seen through Lacy as she tries comprehending them, explaining her weariness at an early age; Janet constantly uses Lacy as her sounding board as these companions come and go. Lacy fears the less time Janet spends with her will break their seemingly indestructible bond.
Janet’s visitors orbit around her, yet Lacey won’t escape her gravitational pull. This symbiosis brings dissatisfaction; Tethered to her mother, Lacy struggles to make friends, whilst Janet deems her relationships cursed because of her tendency to people-please. Fed up with her child's clinginess, Janet seeks space at an age where Lacy is not yet independent.
Playing to her strengths, playwright Annie Baker relies heavily on dialogue laden with pauses to provide us the space to breathe (a luxury Janet doesn't have). Aided by the film’s fly-on-the-wall approach, the varying character dynamics are conveyed within this silence. 16mm film helps capture their inviting house nestled in the woods, isolated like our two protagonists.
Tender, quiet and observational, Janet Planet shows that amongst the difficulty of letting go, life can provide its gentle moments, be that in the form of a fleeting friendship at the mall or a Troll Doll from summer camp. There's a catharsis in Baker reassuring us that we're all still figuring it out.
Screening again at the Capitol on Aug 25.
East of Noon
Hala Elkoussy, 2024
Words by Linus Tolliday
Director Hala Elkoussy’s second feature, the black-and-white 16mm-shot East of Noon, is as much fairy-tale as invective against the power structure that dominates a small, industrial Egyptian town. Our hero, Abdo (Omar Rozek), is a young musician fighting the oppressive local power structure. At almost all times, the film, like Abdo, simmers; and when it doesn’t, it explodes. The local entertainer, Shawky (Ahmed Kamal), has it out for Abdo and holds strong influence over the town, while the corrupt and violent magistrate, Borai (Osama Aboul Atta), personally targets Abdo’s friend, Nunna (Fayza Shama). The film drifts between these heightened, archetypal characters and bursts of realistic violence and emotion, a sharp division which serves to punctuate the moments of cruelty and pain. The film follows Abdo’s growing resistance, which Elkoussy adorns with formal experimentation, such as high-intensity moments giving way to colour sequences, and a repetition of water imagery to symbolise the emotional states of the characters. Elkoussy and cinematographer Abdelsalam Moussa also employ a medium-specific motif of what is typically an unintentional effect of uneven film exposure, by masterfully shaping light leaks into ripples across the screen to invoke the aquatic theme. A tale of resistance and self-expression, East of Noon holds on a note of anger and frustration, though always with a clear love for storytelling.
The Shrouds
David Cronenberg, 2024
Words by Jacob Agius
David Cronenberg has built his oeuvre around a fetishistically macabre focus on the human body, its incessant adaptability and the ways in which burgeoning technologies play a part in its degeneration. However, in his latest film The Shrouds, the body in question is dead and in its place lies something more cerebral – grief.
The film plays out as a rumination on our collective experience with grief in the digital age and its ramifications on our psyche. We follow tech businessman, Karsh (Vincent Cassel) who in the wake of his wife’s death has invented a burial shroud fitted with microscopic cameras that allows mourners to livestream their decaying loved one’s remains. Throughout the film he obsessively watches his late wife’s skeleton at seemingly every waking moment on any smart device he can get his hands on. These devices also house an AI assistant which takes the form of a digital avatar resembling his late wife. Through his embrace of technology Karsh is constantly haunted by her image, stuck in a techno-necromance that consumes his entire life.
Through Karsh’s obsessive actions it’s clear that Cronenberg posits the overindulgence of sharing every moment of our life (here, even in death), our unending interest in smart technology and social media has extended the grieving process far beyond necessary, in this case, through an unnatural ability to indefinitely hold onto those that we’ve lost. Cautioning that when our grief becomes wedded to our smart devices our perception of reality is degenerated, as we’re lost in an endless scroll we lose our livelihoods in the reflection of the black mirror.
Screening again tonight at the Astor.
Vulcanizadora
Joel Potrykus, 2024
Words by Austin Lancaster
There's often a sense of the purgatorial in Joel Potrykus's pitch-black comedies, and in Vulcanizadora, the fire takes the form of an all-consuming, gut-knotting guilt.
Two best friends, Derek (Potrykus) and Marty (Joshua Burge) wander ineptly through a forest. Derek, excessively decked out in camper gear, is the goofball chatterbox to Marty's quiet, reluctant straight man. They muck around, setting off little bombs, bickering and annoying each other; Derek wants to record a version of Faces of Death. The tone then turns. A beach-side outpouring of emotion veers between the bathetic to rawly painful, as we find out the purpose of their journey: a darkly bizarre pact.
Independent to the core, Potrykus has remained faithful to his native Michigan, capturing its environments and milieu in his spiky shoestring-budget films. There's a little Kiarostami in Vulcanizadora: wide shots of figures snaking their way down landscapes, and something of Taste of Cherry's withholding exposition, and its central character's heavy load.
The musical cues are opera (Puccini, amongst others) and heavy metal (Brazilian groove-metal outfit Sepultura) - two genres which might ostensibly be taken as music opposites. But they make natural allies here, both lending a sense of the grandiose to these small manchild's lives.
The characters are carried over from the director's 2014 feature Buzzard, the two young men middle-aged now, having lived long enough to accrue more than a few regrets and run-ins with the law. Potrykus's slacker line-deliveries are golden, while Burge, his long-time collaborator, holds the film's emotional centre in its second half, as a series of reprieves gives only the opposite of relief. In comparison to Potrykus's previous features, Vulcanizadora feels stripped back, however Potrykus and Burge have found some new despairing notes to go along with the irony - the pathetic having become pathos.
Screening tomorrow at 11.45pm at ACMI 1.
A Traveller’s Needs
Hong Sang-soo, 2024
Words by Amelia Leonard
A favourite of MIFF, prolific filmmaker Hong Sang-soo returns with his latest comedy-drama, A Traveller’s Needs. Played by Isabelle Huppert, the film follows Iris, a french woman living in Korea with a mysterious past and a penchant for Korean rice wine who has landed herself a job as a foreign language teacher. Concocting her own experimental approach, Iris claims that by finding a phrase that expresses a deep personal truth and repeating it daily, that a student might one day wake up and their heart will have “assimilated this foreign language”, the experience more akin to a sociological experiment than any tried and tested pedagogy.
This sort of whimsical premise is just what one can expect of a Sang-soo film. He is not interested in traditional storytelling, rather his fascination lies within the everyday and its rhythms, uncovering the internal intricacies that are present even in the most casual of conversations and daily preoccupations. A host of supporting characters embody this interest in social performance, with characters relying heavily on drinking to free themselves from polite niceties, using alcohol as a lubricant to shed their performative personalities and allow their true feelings to come through.
In two key scenes which mirror each other, Iris, after watching her student play an instrument, asks them how they felt. At first they claim they felt happy, but through Iris’ persistent questioning both character’s reveal they felt self-doubt, that they were not good enough. Upon this revelation, Iris’ questioning ceases, giving the sense that her true objective is to find relief, a sense of consolation in humanity’s shared insecurities.
At its essence, it feels the core takeaway of the film is simple yet poignant – that at the end of the day we all walk this life alone and we all feel the same, the circumstances are just different.
The other HSO film is playing on Sunday 25 Aug.
Occupied City
Steve McQueen, 2023
Words by Linus Tolliday
Occupied City could very well be the apotheosis of director Steve McQueen’s career-long obsession with extended duration. His films have always been characterised by long takes and deliberate, methodical pacing. For his tome on Amsterdam, McQueen’s pacing is glacial.
An adaptation of the book, Atlas of an Occupied City, by Bianca Stigter (director of Three Minutes: A Lengthening, and McQueen’s wife), the film takes on the conceit of a dual narrative, where the visual component of the film depicts Amsterdam during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, spanning the period before, during and after the city’s lockdown mandates; and the audio component details historical events from World War II, as related to the locations seen, via narration by Melanie Hyams. This creates an ever-evolving tension throughout the film, which, while repetitively structured, acts as a kind of mental acuity test: the image lulls and endears with a cute baby playing with a labrador, only to be perturbed by the description of a horrific murder in the same house.
McQueen has undoubtedly compiled a sturdy documentation of Amsterdam through two different periods, with some remarkable and affecting visual compositions (including a tobogganing sequence), though the film’s repetition gradually slides into monotony. Ultimately, one wonders whether the whole point of Occupied City is to feel overwhelmed by and eventually numbed to the tragic events. In this case, by confronting the audience with intimidating volume and scale, McQueen fatigues us and then, retroactively, poses this as an ethical dilemma.
Lake Mungo
Joel Anderson, 2008
By Jacob Agius
After what feels like an eternity of existing in obscurity, Lake Mungo, Joel Anderson’s sole feature film, makes its triumphant return to the big screen with a new 4K restoration fifteen years after its release. Underappreciated in Australia, the film has developed a cult following in online film communities who championed its bone-chillingly devastating depiction of a grief stricken family who believe that the ghost of their recently deceased daughter is haunting them. What appears on the surface as a ghost story developes into a family drama that examines the traumatic effects of grief.
Presented as a faux documentary, it largely plays out in a series of talking head interviews that are overlaid with ‘found footage’ that was put together with such meticulous detail that it went as far as creating fake news reports branded with WIN news logos, home movies of the once happy family, and murky police footage all presented in a grainy aesthetic. Throughout these montages, the voiceover that accompanies this footage sees the family attempt to unpack their grief as they’re being interviewed. The attention to detail presented in this faux found footage paired with the interviews that the actors mainly improvised creates such a mesmerising sense of authenticity that the film becomes almost indistinguishable from a real documentary. It is cinéma vérité at its absolute finest.
Shot on DV cameras that were readily accessible to Australian households at the time, the aesthetic of this footage, and the film as a whole, feels familiar and quotidian, making it all the more chilling to the viewer. The family onscreen are so effectively realised that it’s effortless to put yourself in their shoes, which makes their grief and the ensuing horror all the more haunting.
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