MIFF Day 11
Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me...
POLISSE
Starting off my annual round of birthday movies, Polisse is based around actual cases from the Paris Child Protection Unit. How do you make an entertaining film about a unit that arrests paedophiles, pimps and other child abusers? The answer is to make the film about the police themselves, and focus less on the crimes and more on the black humour they use to cope, as well as the ways in which the job has screwed them up. And it works. It's a surprisingly fun film about some pretty awful stuff, and I'm amazed that it managed to do so without trivialising its subject matter. The end is out of left field and fairly pointless, but everything that comes before it is really engaging. Somehow it manages to maintain a hopeful tone despite the awfulness that the officers are combating.
THE FUTURE
Miranda July's Me and You and Everyone We Know hit me out of left field a number of years ago and was one of the standout films of MIFF that year. I'm not sure The Future sits with me in the same way, though I think it's a lot smarter than it initially appears. Covered in oddball whimsy and narrated by a cat in an animal shelter, it's the story of Sophie (July) and Jason (Hamish Linklater), two 35 year olds who realise that they're close to middle age and have done nothing with their lives. Given I turned 35 today, there's a certain resonance for me in it all. Quitting their jobs, they go to seek meaning in their lives, but while Jason manages to go and enjoy life, Sophie is paralysed. She wants to create a dance video for youtube that will give her a small amount of fame, but she can't really dance. So she ends up having an affair and leaving Jason instead. The joy of attention versus the responsibility to someone you love is teased at more than explored, but there's some very wise words said about struggling through the awful things we can do to each other, as well as looking at the false pressures we place on ourselves and the ways we waste our time. Being a film by a performance artist, narrative isn't exactly it's strong point, and the end jars tonally with the rest of the film, but reflecting on it I find a lot to appreciate. It's at once more mature and less focused than Me and You and Everyone We Know, so I'm still unable to decide on it completely. But for all its faults, I liked it. I just didn't love it the way I immediately did her first film.
OUTRAGE
Takeshi Kitano returns to the Yakuza thriller genre he pretty much owned throughout the 90s and 2000s. And he's bored. Outrage is a fun film, and the audience I saw it with filled the cinema with plenty of gasps, laughs and cheers as several warring factions of Yakuza screw each other over and kill each other in a mad scramble to the top of the pile, but it's only good, not great. It's nowhere near the same level as Kitano's earlier films, and even Brother was better than this. The problem lies in the fact that there's nobody to root for, or hate, we just watch as people kill each other and do gangster things like stand over businesses, blackmail government officials, cut off their fingers and bash each other. It's more of a fishbowl experience, looking in but completely removed. You could maybe argue it's about the pointlessness of it all, but that point was made far better back in Sonatine and with a great deal more elan. Even Kitano's usually careful framing of shots is missing. After a trilogy of experimental films (Takeshis, Glory to the Filmmaker and Achilles and the Tortoise) I wonder if he just needed to turn a profit on a film. It's good fun, and entertaining enough, but from a master of the genre, this is much less than expected.
POLISSE
Starting off my annual round of birthday movies, Polisse is based around actual cases from the Paris Child Protection Unit. How do you make an entertaining film about a unit that arrests paedophiles, pimps and other child abusers? The answer is to make the film about the police themselves, and focus less on the crimes and more on the black humour they use to cope, as well as the ways in which the job has screwed them up. And it works. It's a surprisingly fun film about some pretty awful stuff, and I'm amazed that it managed to do so without trivialising its subject matter. The end is out of left field and fairly pointless, but everything that comes before it is really engaging. Somehow it manages to maintain a hopeful tone despite the awfulness that the officers are combating.
THE FUTURE
Miranda July's Me and You and Everyone We Know hit me out of left field a number of years ago and was one of the standout films of MIFF that year. I'm not sure The Future sits with me in the same way, though I think it's a lot smarter than it initially appears. Covered in oddball whimsy and narrated by a cat in an animal shelter, it's the story of Sophie (July) and Jason (Hamish Linklater), two 35 year olds who realise that they're close to middle age and have done nothing with their lives. Given I turned 35 today, there's a certain resonance for me in it all. Quitting their jobs, they go to seek meaning in their lives, but while Jason manages to go and enjoy life, Sophie is paralysed. She wants to create a dance video for youtube that will give her a small amount of fame, but she can't really dance. So she ends up having an affair and leaving Jason instead. The joy of attention versus the responsibility to someone you love is teased at more than explored, but there's some very wise words said about struggling through the awful things we can do to each other, as well as looking at the false pressures we place on ourselves and the ways we waste our time. Being a film by a performance artist, narrative isn't exactly it's strong point, and the end jars tonally with the rest of the film, but reflecting on it I find a lot to appreciate. It's at once more mature and less focused than Me and You and Everyone We Know, so I'm still unable to decide on it completely. But for all its faults, I liked it. I just didn't love it the way I immediately did her first film.
OUTRAGE
Takeshi Kitano returns to the Yakuza thriller genre he pretty much owned throughout the 90s and 2000s. And he's bored. Outrage is a fun film, and the audience I saw it with filled the cinema with plenty of gasps, laughs and cheers as several warring factions of Yakuza screw each other over and kill each other in a mad scramble to the top of the pile, but it's only good, not great. It's nowhere near the same level as Kitano's earlier films, and even Brother was better than this. The problem lies in the fact that there's nobody to root for, or hate, we just watch as people kill each other and do gangster things like stand over businesses, blackmail government officials, cut off their fingers and bash each other. It's more of a fishbowl experience, looking in but completely removed. You could maybe argue it's about the pointlessness of it all, but that point was made far better back in Sonatine and with a great deal more elan. Even Kitano's usually careful framing of shots is missing. After a trilogy of experimental films (Takeshis, Glory to the Filmmaker and Achilles and the Tortoise) I wonder if he just needed to turn a profit on a film. It's good fun, and entertaining enough, but from a master of the genre, this is much less than expected.
posted by Andrew Lee at 11:35 PM
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