MIFF Day 16
One sleep to go until Scott Pilgrim!!!
THE HUNTER
This is what you call a "Festival Film". I doubt it would successfully screen anywhere else. It's too sketchy to be a crowd-pleaser and not smart enough to be an arthouse success. It does have an effective use of Radiohead's Hunting Bears (off Amnesiac) as a recurring score, the lone twang of the electric guitar working well to highlight the loneliness of our protagonist, Ali. But really that's the highlight. Rafi Pitts plays Ali, as well as writing and directing. Possibly he thought his on-screen charisma would be enough to carry the underwritten material, but like The Robber, the film never really allows us access to Ali, so sympathy is limited. The basic ideas are good, a humble man, a former prisoner, works night shifts to provide for his wife and daughter. When they're killed in the crossfire between insurgents and police, he retaliates by killing a few police officers and then gets hunted. But he's a hunter, so in theory the chase should be interesting. It's not. Instead we get a crappy third act where two corrupt officers capture him almost immediately then march him around the forest while they bicker. Maybe it was meant to be an expose of how the police are corrupt and incompetent, but it doesn't really work. Ultimately none of it connects. It's enjoyable enough while you still think there might be some intelligence about to surface, there's a sense of it bubbling below the surface. But that's why it's a "Film Festival" film. It teases with a sense of its own importance, but never delivers. Disappointing.
NOSTALGIA FOR THE LIGHT
A beautiful and disturbing meditation on history and its importance in our lives. Beginning with some spectacular shots of a telescope in the middle of the Atacama desert in Chile, it had me thinking this would go well with Baraka. The time-lapse nightscapes are spectacular and the deep-space photography is gorgeous. But then it surprises, as an astronomer compares himself to an archaeologist, both deal in the past. The light received through the telescope is a record of something in the past. And history fills the Atacama desert, as an archaeologist discusses the rock carvings and mummified remains found there. All this serves a purpose, as the film turns its attention to the atrocities under the reign of General Pinochet, and the countless thousands of "disappeared", many of whom were put into mass graves in the same desert. Shifting to the wives and daughters of missing men who comb the desert hoping to find the bodies of their beloveds, director Patricio Guzman speaks of the need to learn from history, to examine it and to remember it. He is clearly bothered by people's desire to move on without examining the past, and contrasts the learnings from science with the refusal to learn from the nation's violent history, something he does not shy away from showing in graphic and disturbing detail. The film is not 100% successful in making the connection, but it's a visually beautiful and original take on the importance of history in our lives, and a disturbing reminder of the horrors that for some Chileans have still not been put to rest.
THE HUNTER
This is what you call a "Festival Film". I doubt it would successfully screen anywhere else. It's too sketchy to be a crowd-pleaser and not smart enough to be an arthouse success. It does have an effective use of Radiohead's Hunting Bears (off Amnesiac) as a recurring score, the lone twang of the electric guitar working well to highlight the loneliness of our protagonist, Ali. But really that's the highlight. Rafi Pitts plays Ali, as well as writing and directing. Possibly he thought his on-screen charisma would be enough to carry the underwritten material, but like The Robber, the film never really allows us access to Ali, so sympathy is limited. The basic ideas are good, a humble man, a former prisoner, works night shifts to provide for his wife and daughter. When they're killed in the crossfire between insurgents and police, he retaliates by killing a few police officers and then gets hunted. But he's a hunter, so in theory the chase should be interesting. It's not. Instead we get a crappy third act where two corrupt officers capture him almost immediately then march him around the forest while they bicker. Maybe it was meant to be an expose of how the police are corrupt and incompetent, but it doesn't really work. Ultimately none of it connects. It's enjoyable enough while you still think there might be some intelligence about to surface, there's a sense of it bubbling below the surface. But that's why it's a "Film Festival" film. It teases with a sense of its own importance, but never delivers. Disappointing.
NOSTALGIA FOR THE LIGHT
A beautiful and disturbing meditation on history and its importance in our lives. Beginning with some spectacular shots of a telescope in the middle of the Atacama desert in Chile, it had me thinking this would go well with Baraka. The time-lapse nightscapes are spectacular and the deep-space photography is gorgeous. But then it surprises, as an astronomer compares himself to an archaeologist, both deal in the past. The light received through the telescope is a record of something in the past. And history fills the Atacama desert, as an archaeologist discusses the rock carvings and mummified remains found there. All this serves a purpose, as the film turns its attention to the atrocities under the reign of General Pinochet, and the countless thousands of "disappeared", many of whom were put into mass graves in the same desert. Shifting to the wives and daughters of missing men who comb the desert hoping to find the bodies of their beloveds, director Patricio Guzman speaks of the need to learn from history, to examine it and to remember it. He is clearly bothered by people's desire to move on without examining the past, and contrasts the learnings from science with the refusal to learn from the nation's violent history, something he does not shy away from showing in graphic and disturbing detail. The film is not 100% successful in making the connection, but it's a visually beautiful and original take on the importance of history in our lives, and a disturbing reminder of the horrors that for some Chileans have still not been put to rest.
posted by Andrew Lee at 9:19 PM
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