"Accomplishments"
In theaters: Writer-director Chandler Levack definitely likes her characters to fail at their long-held ambitions, so if you like to watch someone set goals and then screw everything up, Mile End Kicks may be for you. In a way, it's I Like Movies (see below) for music, with Barbie Ferreira playing a young and promising music critic who moves to Montreal from Toronto to write a book and maybe live a little, but instead of focusing her, the new environment proves to be a complete distraction and her summer crushes threaten to derail her plans. Farreira is great in this - you're totally on board with her character even when you know she's making mistakes - and there are a lot of laughs, most connected to how much of a poser the lead singer she falls for is. As with I Like Movies, Levack seems to have put a lot of herself into the script, and it's intelligent about, in this case, music, and the experiences feel lived. Is 2011 now "period"? It appears so, and the fashions might make you feel nostalgic.
At home: I suppose I'm meant to relate to Lawrence, the lead of Canadian Cringe classic I Like Movies, because - and this may not have been lost on you - I like movies too, and I do, just not the terribly asocial bits. Obviously, the kid has problems, and he's the hard pill you have to swallow as an audience as you watch him abuse his single mom, push his only friend away, and generally be rude to people. Can a kid from a Toronto suburb become a film maker based on his genuine love of film? Yes, but only if he gets out of his own way. It's a coming of age, but he has to come a lonnnng way. This is a movie about the love of movies, and you therefore discover WHEN it's set by the movies that are just out. Some fun homage moments to other films, but I could definitely have used more. Some laughs, some heart, some drama... The ending is a bit saccharine for me, but fine. I had the most affection for the mother figures in the movie, especially the great Krista Bridges (Republic of Doyle, and just about every TV show filmed in Canada in the last 25 years) as the long-suffering mom, though Romina D’Ugo is strong as the video store manager who takes an interest in the young cinephile.
Chandler Levack's first film that she also didn't write is definitely up her alley, but Roommates' comedy is perhaps broader than her own films, and its look has a Netflix-mandated television presentation. That said, it's better than I expected and often genuinely funny. Sadlie Sandler (yes, daughter of) is a wallflower who, afraid she won't make any friends in college (a concern that's also in Levack's previous movies), essentially picks the first cool person nice to her at orientation to be her roommate. And it's a terrible mistake because Chloe East's character is just about the most inconsiderate user of people imaginable. But in Levack fashion, it's not like Sandler is reacting properly - they both do some terrible things. Fun to see the all-star comediennes in the supporting cast, like Natasha Lyonne, Carol Kane (a mother-daughter combo if I ever saw one), and Janeane Garofalo. The conceit that this is all a cautionary tale told by the dean is rather unnecessary, and even silly, but I did laugh at some of the gags there, so not complaining too much. The epilogue does overreach, but stick around 'til the end for some doll house shenanigans.
If you've ever, as an adult, gotten a pet, especially a rescue, The Heirloom is going to resonate. The parental anxiety towards the animal - in this case, a sad-looking, heart-melting whippet - in particular, is a common feeling. Set the year of the lockdown, the film is based on the true story of Toronto-based director Ben Petrie and his partner, actress Grace Glowicki, playing themselves under different names, quickly getting a dog before the doors close. Petrie eventually decides to make a film about adopting "Milly" (who I'm guessing is also playing herself?), and things get metatextual to say the least, as the film doubles back on itself, and perhaps gets "too real" when the endeavour puts a strain on their relationship. Of course, they also have a conversation about how real to make it, and we're seeing the compromise. Layered in is Petrie's interior monologue where he treats himself AS a misbehaving dog, showing less empathy towards himself than he does the pet who doesn't know any better. Matt Johnson is featured as the voice of the "Belligerent Vet" (Petrie has acted in Johnson projects). And the ending is a pretty perfect release, which I think also ties into old COVID feelings.
In Rotting in the Sun, Chilean director Sebastián Silva (Crystal Fairy & the Magical Cactus) plays a suicidal and shame-driven shade of himself who encounters a much too familiar and amorous Jordan Firstman, an Instagrammer also playing himself, who meet at a meat market/gay nudist beach and, no, don't really hit it off, though Firstman, because of his narcissism, believes so. These portrayals are so terrible, I have to commend both on playing the worst part of themselves for all to see. And while it's about them, it's even more about Silva's suffering housekeeper played by Catalina Saavedra (the one person not playing themselves, practically). I wasn't ready for the twist in this, and neither are you, but this is a film about desperation and what it can drive people to, and each character represents a different type of despair. Absorbing. And it also features the worst/best version of Total Eclipse of the Heart you've ever heard, too.
Just off his six years in house arrest, Jafar Panahi, who had been making films at home in defiance of his 20-year ban on film making, took to the streets in Taxi, a docudrama in which he drives a cab in Tehran, picks up a diverse tranche of society, and uses them to make political points, just about in real time. Early on, a passenger recognizes him and calls him out on his digital "security camera" set-up, says he knows the other passengers must have been actors, but that only obfuscates what's real and what's scripted. I'd love it if at least one of these rides were real, but the guerrilla film making is impressive nonetheless. Panahi is doing this not out of financial necessity, but because he's under surveillance, and yet still feels the need to practice his art. Though there are some dramatic moments, the tone is that of a jovial cab ride, and therefore closer to comedy, though one that makes you feel the sting of current events. A lackadaisical way to get a good picture of the Regime's repression, even as people are walking around, just living their lives (the rules imposed on films, as discussed with Panahi's little niece, are quite something). It can feel like unconnected vignettes, but the strong ending wraps things up in a way that makes everything come together, which is surely the mark of fiction.
No Bears, no fear, right? Playful, but absolutely tragic, the film shows how Jafar Panahi could make films in spite of the bans against him, and that nowhere in Iran is really safe for him. At least, that's the anxiety, the bear. It's a film about frustration, with orthodoxy plaguing him at every point, whether it's the State's or the superstitions of the village he's decided to stay in and which draw him into petty scandals. His stand-ins, on the outside, are a couple trying to leave the Middle East (actors, but also living it, perhaps just as he is, but fictionalized, just as he, perhaps is), and a pair of lovers in the village who are stymied by a family arrangement. Panahi's camera is shown as dangerous to both, in different ways. Dangerous for its fiction-making, its falseness. Dangerous for its documenting fact, its truthfulness. What can a film maker do, if everything he does is wrong? And is it, in fact, wrong? Or is much ado about no bears? The scene on the border with Turkey crystallizes this paranoid notion. The final shot suggest a decision or, at least, a realization, but we're not privy to it. What would the next 10 seconds show?
Abbas Kiarostami's Where Is the Friend's House? is an undeniable masterpiece. He returned to the village of Koker meta-textually in Life, and Nothing More, where an actor playing him went back to see if his all-local, non-actor cast was okay following a devastating earthquake. And the Koker Trilogy ends with Through the Olive Trees, in which a different actor playing him directs the previous actor playing him in a behind the scenes story that either happened or didn't during the shooting of the second film. Got all that? It mostly concerns a scene I remember well, and how difficult it is to shoot because the non-actors, reprising their roles as a young married couple in "Life, and", have a history that makes them difficult to direct. Hossein loves the girl, but she's just not into him, or perhaps (he hopes), she can't say she is because of social mores, and that ending really toys with your emotions and that's all I'll say. But Hossein's frustrations are the production's, trying to get to something perfect, but finding that not everyone is on the same page as you are. Meanwhile, we get a playful sense of what Kiarostami's directorial style is on set, and look for his pupil Jafar Pahani behind a bushy moustache, playing himself as the assistant director of the film.
[1951] The River: Jean Renoir's first color film, adapted from Rumer Godden's semi-autobiographical coming of age novel, has a dated colonial outlook, not only because of its focus on white people in India, but because it - like the book - is part of the the "exotic setting" subgenre, where the main marketing point was showing a then more isolated Western audience other climes and cultures. India plays itself and is beautiful, but the images and literary narration are too too often concerned with instructing us rather than weaving those elements into the story. And in terms of being dated, having all these underage girls seeking a kiss from their adult summer crush, a disabled veteran, may give some the ick, although I think the ending to that particular story is pitch perfect. (I say this as if there's any other story, but there really isn't.) Where the Indian-ness comes most through is in the idea of the infinite being contained in the particular, and how things return to the great River in the end. This is Little Women in India, but honestly, much of this could have happened in some English county, and I have a hard time connection with the vain sisters or the rather opaque soldier. The family next door was more interesting. Perhaps the best thing about The River is that Satyajit Ray met Renoir during filming, which launched him into the career that would make him India's premiere film maker.
[1952] Ikiru: It means "to live", and Takashi Shimura's character never really has. His a minor bureaucrat in a system whose principal activities are passing the buck and bootlicking. Until he is diagnosed with stomach cancer and knows he has only months to live... except he doesn't know what that means. There is "to exist", which he has cautiously done. There is "to live fully", a quality he sees in an ebullient former co-worker he comes to obsess over (Miki Odagiri). And there's "to live on after one's death", which may be his answer, and a concern Kurosawa would return to, especially near the end of his life. The man's self-pity is nearly offputting, and it's only really when others have to mourn him that the film emotionally gripped me. As you might expect, the shots are perfect and there are a lot of clever ideas (the flashback transitions are particularly well done, but there's also a bold structural conceit in the third act). A heavy drama, but also a savage satire of Japanese bureaucracy, which itself has a terminal cancer, and I name that cancer human nature.
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