Tag: 2015

Review: Twenty Two

History sometimes has a way of getting muddled in the pursuit of political and personal aims. Chinese director Guo Ke’s TWENTY TWO (二十二) shreds away agendas and simply examines the surviving people at the heart of a war crime.

Of the 200,000 Chinese women that the film estimates were forced into sex slavery during the Japanese occupation of World War II, only 22 elderly women were still alive at the time of filming. Expanding on Guo’s directorial debut short Thirty Two, released in 2012, it follows the daily lives of the survivors.

Guo’s subject matter is a difficult one, yet his presentation is simplicity itself. Taking an observational approach rather than an intrusive one, his lens is just as likely to fall on rain as it hits an awning or sun over a field as it is on the women themselves. Some of these women are now in nursing homes or other facilities, and Guo is concerned with them being forgotten there.

Which makes the reason for this documentary all the more powerful when Guo reminds us of it. Fragments of memories are expressed to camera, recounting tales of brutality and torture. Several women tell Guo of their rape and abuse before breaking the conversation to tell him they no longer “feel comfortable talking about it.”

For all of the arm’s length approach, the documentary never wants us to forget the atrocities. As one interviewee observes, it is insufficient to call them ‘comfort women’ or any other euphemism. These are victims who were forced into sexual slavery during World War II. The continued survival of these women is a reminder of their state-sanction assault, and mere observation of their later lives is enough to make a firm point to their aggressors.

TWENTY TWO was originally presented at the Busan International Film Festival back in 2015, but this global release (recut by The Assassin editor Liao Ching-Song) fulfils an intent to spread the story of these women across the world. “I did not want these women lost to history,” said Guo at the time. Thanks to this powerful document, hopefully they never will be.

[stextbox id=”grey” bgcolor=”F2F2F2″ mleft=”5″ mright=”5″ image=”null”]2017 | China | DIR: Guo Ke | WRITERS: Guo Ke | RUNNING TIME: 99 minutes | DISTRIBUTOR: China Lion (AUS) | RELEASE DATE: 7 September 2017 (AUS)[/stextbox]

September 10, 2017
Review: The Virgin Psychics

The career of Sion Sono has seen some of the most eclectic collections of films and projects of any artist working in the medium. Of the half-dozen films he released in 2015 alone, there was a fantasy drama (Love & Peace), an existential sci-fi flick (The Whispering Star), an action film (Shinjuku Swan) and a suspense horror film (Tag). Which makes this particular offering simultaneously strange and perfectly at ease with Sono’s oeuvre, as the avant-garde filmmaker enters the realm of teen comedy.

Based on the manga series Minna! Esupa Dayo! by Kiminori Wakasugi, THE VIRGIN PSYCHICS (映画みんな！エスパーだよ！) is actually a consolidation of a 12-part series Sono directed for television. In Notsu, Oita Prefecture, virginal teen Yoshiro (Shota Sometani) is granted the ability to read minds after being struck with cosmic rays while masturbating. He soon realises that he isn’t the only one, and that the combined powers of the new ESPers might be the only thing capable of saving the world from an imminent threat.

THE VIRGIN PSYCHICS is about as batty as its plot description sounds. Aping the over-the-top language of the manga that it derives from, the comedy is very much based in the realm of boner gags. Powers range from mind-reading and nude teleporting through to telekinetic manipulation of sex toys. The evil plot is similarly inclined, with a collective of wicked psychics raising an army of soldiers like a nymphomaniac version of pod people.

Looking like it was constructed inside a teenage boy’s brainpan, the ridiculously short skirts, deep cleavages and non-sequitur shots of panties leave no doubt that the film has sex on the brain. Yet for all of the overt sexual references, the film is surprisingly coy about nudity with a sexually curious innocence about it. The inability of certain characters to control their urges at all is partially mocking that entitled mentality, but it’s borderline obsessive as well. There’s also a broad cultural attitude towards homosexuality and sexual promiscuity that doesn’t necessarily sit well with Western audiences, or anybody over the age of 12 for that matter, and it’s what separates Sono’s film/series from being an effective parody.

The strangest thing about THE VIRGIN PSYCHICS, and that’s saying something, is that the truncated series never really makes you feel as though you are missing something. It’s a whole entity, if not always a sensible one. The brightly coloured photography matches the extreme performance of Sometani, a cartoon series of exaggerated facial expressions and high-pitched squeals that are at odds with his more dramatic performances.

If you can get your hands on it, you may want to seek out the full series and television special that this comes from. It’s far from Sono’s finest film work, although as a spiritual companion to Tag or a lighthearted descendant of the kinds of epic films he made a decade ago (Love Exposure), it will undoubtedly scratch a certain itch.

THE VIRGIN PSYCHICS is playing at the Sydney Underground Film Festival at the Factory Theatre from 15-19 September 2016.

2015 | Japan | DIR: Sion Sono | WRITERS: Shinichi Tanaka, Sion Sono (Based on the manga by Kiminori Wakasugi) | CAST: Shota Sometani, Elaiza Ikeda, Erina Mano | DISTRIBUTOR: SUFF 2016 (AUS) | RUNNING TIME: 114 minutes

September 15, 2016
Review: Happy Hour

One of the longer films in recent memory is also a completely immersive experience that allows audiences and actors to share some time together.

HAPPY HOUR (ハッピーアワー) runs for well over five hours, and on that level is as experimental a film as you are likely to see. Yet the four award-winning leads, collectively given best actress at the 2015 Locarno International Film Festival, ensure that that time is spent exploring the most human of moments. What results from the gently epic journey is a rare beast, a delicate balance of heightened drama that still allows deep character exploration on a common theme of connections and conversations.

Set in and around Kobe in Japan, four thirty-something friends Jun (Rira Kawamura), Akari (Sachie Tanaka), Sakurako (Hazuki Kikuchi) and Fumi (Maiko Mihara) have known each other for years. They make regular lunch appointments, go on trips together, and feel as though they can confide pretty much anything in each other. However, when “ex-housewife” Jun reveals to the rest of the group that she is seeking a divorce from her husband Kohei (Zahana Yoshitaka), something only school friend and fellow housewife Sakurako had previously known, it kicks off uncertainty and a a series of changes within the group. Stressed PR rep Fumi is particularly outraged, perhaps an early sign of the cracks in the perfect facade of her own marriage to a seemingly laidback book editor.

The format of HAPPY HOUR might better lend itself to television, but watching it in one continuous sitting (as was the case at the Melbourne International Film Festival) forces the audience to experience the emotional ups and downs of the lead’s lives. We become passive participants in these intersecting journeys, and the extended running time allows co-writer/director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi a luxury few filmmakers afford themselves by letting the camera linger on moments. There’s a self-help seminar early in the film that virtually plays in real-time, and these long sequences filled with overlapping dialogue carry on into a restaurant immediately afterwards. At other times, such as Jun’s divorce hearing, the unwavering eye of the camera is an unfeeling witness to the harsh treatment of Japan’s family law system. The film culminates in a monotonic book reading, during which the tension between the players (and the notable absence of one) becomes silently explosive.

During sequences that are effectively conversations in cars, it’s easy to recall the work of the late, great Abbas Kiarostami. Yet despite the intimidating length of HAPPY HOUR, there’s simply so much going on to ever consider it a slow film. During the book reading, Kohei makes a comment that he felt “this seemingly calm story was really quite dramatic,” a rare moment of emotion from the character that might also be a meta remark on Hamaguchi, Tadashi Nohara, and Tomoyuki Takahashi’s screenplay. When the glue of Jun is suddenly absent from the group, the second half of the film is filled with activity, from Sakurako’s teenage son impregnating his girlfriend, to dedicated nurse Akari exploring her sexuality in a more decisive way. It’s a film of two halves, of the group together and alone, and it’s only apart that their insecurities come to the fore.

HAPPY HOUR is not a wholly seamless experience, but it is a uniquely enveloping one. Cast from participants in Hamaguchi’s acting workshops, there’s an awkward realism to every interaction, adding to the immediacy of the piece. There’s also more conclusions to the film than one of Peter Jackson’s sagas, but the same could be said of life as well. Indeed, this is what Hamaguchi has ultimately created here: a microcosm of life and all of its trivialities, but told with such utter sincerity that it’s impossible to look away.

HAPPY HOUR is playing at the Melbourne International Film Festival 28 July – 14 August 2016.

2015 | Japan | DIR: Ryûsuke Hamaguchi | WRITER: Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Tadashi Nohara, Tomoyuki Takahashi | CAST: Sachie Tanaka, Hazuki Kikuchi, Maiko Mihara, Rira Kawamura | RUNNING TIME: 317 minutes | DISTRIBUTOR: MIFF 2016 (AUS) | RATING: ★★★★

August 8, 2016
Review: Fear Itself

A visual essay examining the nature of fear also works as a potted history of horror cinema, but asks the audience to place themselves in the frame.

What are you afraid of? If it’s reading festival reviews online, then you’ve certainly just stepped knee-deep into your worst nightmares here. Horror films trade their stock on those previously untapped apprehensions, taking the viewer (or reader) directly into the mouth of madness. In FEAR ITSELF, originally screened as a BBC iPlayer documentary piece, journalist and filmmaker Charlie Lyne runs through almost a hundred examples of fear on screen in an attempt to document this intangible feeling.

Like Beyond Clueless, Lyne’s previous examination of teen movies, the filmmaker constructs his picture almost entirely from scenes of other movies. It’s not so much a documentary as it is a video essay, held together by the gentle narration of Amy E. Watson. Think of it as wandering through a virtual museum, where each of the pieces are thematically connected by a disembodied voice.

FEAR ITSELF is certainly not the first attempt to document horror cinema’s rich past, with BBC’s A History of Horror predating this, not to mention US-specific fare like Nightmares in Red, White and Blue. Lyne’s essay certainly covers the broadest range of horror in a single document to date, mixing more familiar fare like A Nightmare on Elm Street 4 (1988), Ringu (1988) and Suspiria (1977) with less-ubiquitous entries Post Tenebras Lux (2012), Kyôfu kikei ningen (1969), and Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971). Australia’s own Patrick (1978), itself the partial subject of the 2008 documentary Not Quite Hollywood, also gets a brief look-in.

The lyrical musing on the nature of horror, like the film itself, doesn’t appear to have any particular direction to it. As Watson’s voice contemplates aspects of fear, recounting a scripted “memory” of a similar incident from her past, Lyne’s editing intercuts her words with comparable visuals. Lyne and Watson are adding a new layer to the films they present, crafting their own uncomfortable story in the process. For example, Watson admits to not knowing what to do with herself “ever since the accident,” which of course raises its own questions. It’s through these asides the she suggests we need to go through fear in order to gain the relief at the end.

Early in the film, the narrator comments that she is starting to “feel used” by the conventions of horror movies. As FEAR ITSELF slowly meanders through a history of clips, her softly spoken over an atmospheric hum feels just as manipulative. Never changing tone between clips of Frankenstein (1931) or Martyrs (2008), the abstract approach ultimately robs the clips shown of any impact. If this is the point, to demonstrate that fear out of context are simply words and pictures on screen, then it still leaves us with the question we came in on.

FEAR ITSELF is playing at the Melbourne International Film Festival 28 July – 14 August 2016.

2015 | UK | DIR: Charlie Lyne | WRITER: Charlie Lyne | CAST: Amy E. Watson | RUNNING TIME: 88 minutes | RATING: ★★½

July 25, 2016
Review: Our Huff and Puff Journey

It’s not about the destination in this Japanese road movie, even if that destination is a boy band.

OUR HUFF AND PUFF JOURNEY (私たちのハァハァ) couldn’t be stylistically further from Daigo Matsui’s over-the-top 2012 debut, Afro Tanaka. Matsui has directed three other features in as many years since then, including Daily Lives of High School Boys and Wonderful World End. While the latter was based on several music videos (for Seiko Oomori), here Matsui combines the lives of school kids with a film that in some ways acts as an extended promotion for boy band CreepHyp.

Four female high school students on the cusp of adulthood decide to make the trip from Fukuoka to Tokyo to see CreepHyp. Recording their journey with a handheld camera, and hoping to generate social media buzz along the way, the girls make the 1000 km journey (or 621 miles) on their bicycles. What seems like schoolgirl folly becomes all-consuming, taking turns that force them to grow up faster than expected.

It’s trite but true to say that OUR HUFF AND PUFF JOURNEY is all about the road less travelled, and not about the final stop. Everything about the venture seems innocent at first, from the fact that they run away still wearing their school uniforms to the daydreamy swooning over the band. Yet early on, one of the girls comments that the adventure is less scary than the first time she had sex, reminding us not to make assumptions. Uneasy moments sneak in with some of the single men they hitchhike with, although there’s never any pervading sense of threat. It’s only later, when they are forced to work as hostesses to pay for the final leg of their trip, that the film acknowledges the darker side of this single-minded journey.

Matsui thankfully avoids using the direct-to-handheld-camera technique for the whole film, with the most intimate moments shot from a distance, as if shot by an unseen fifth member of the group. In these scenes of singing or arguing, the heart of their characters is more readily exposed, as it is not the version they want to show to the world. Indeed, when one girl shares their poverty plight with a member of CreepHyp on social media, hoping he will feel responsible for them, the most dedicated of the girls flips out, terrified that the band will somehow think less of them when the trolls start mocking them. Here the film works at its best, a character-driven study of obsession, social media, self-image and the divisiveness it causes. As if to underline this point, one scene plays out silently, with conversations across a bus displayed entirely through text messages, forcing them to go offline to avoid telling one girl the whole story.

When the final destination is reached, the film falls back on some more familiar conventions, set against a live concert performance by CreepHyp. Unlike the singular goal that has driven the rest of the film, their fate is less certain at the end of the narrative than it was at the start, and Matsui doesn’t give us the satisfaction of a happily every after. For some it will undoubtedly be a memorable moment of youth, while for others it will be the defining turning point in their personal history.

OUR HUFF AND PUFF JOURNEY is playing at the Melbourne International Film Festival 28 July – 14 August 2016.

2015 | Japan | DIR: Daigo Matsui | WRITER: Daigo Matsui | CAST: Sonoko Inoue, Reika Oozeki, Saku Mayama, Toko Miura, CreepHyp | RUNNING TIME: 90 minutes | RATING: ★★★½

July 23, 2016
Review: The Wave (Bølgen) (Scandinavian Film Festival 2016)

Norway’s first disaster movie holds true to the tricks of the genre, but does it with designer furniture and prettier landscapes.

As the stock footage playing over the opening credits informs us, the precarious crumbling mountains that surround Norway’s Tafjord could result in an incredible disaster. Based loosely on the real-life 1934 disaster, when 2 million cubic metres of rock fell into the Tafjorden and caused a deadly tsunami, director Roar Uthaug updates the concept with the conventions of modern blockbusters.

THE WAVE (or BØLGEN) follows geologist Kristian (Kristoffer Joner), who is ready to leave town with his wife and son. Working at the Early Warning Centre, there are indicators that an event could be on its way, but true to convention, nobody is willing to commit to this during tourist season. When disaster strikes, and the mountain gives way to a massive tidal wave, the town is given less than ten minutes to evacuate from the wave of destruction. The film rapidly becomes a series of vignettes of the various cast members attempting to escape microcosms of the wider disaster, a pattern that will undoubtedly be familiar to fans of the sub-genre.

Writers John Kåre Raake and Harald Rosenløw-Eeg have clearly been influenced by the plethora of Hollywood disaster films of the last few decades, with Dante’s Peak and Twister notable touchstones for THE WAVE. From colleague Arvid (Fridtjov Saheim) – seemingly taking on the role of the mayor from Jaws – through to the chaotic finale, Uthaug’s film systematically ticks off elements of the formula. People are trapped in air pockets, separated from family members, and running en masse from traffic jams. There’s even that one guy who goes a little crazy and tries to kill his companions.

It’s all been done before, of course, but where THE WAVE differs from Hollywood fare is both in the cultural realities and the filmmaking style. The shopfront and narrative might be drenched in a recognisable tropes, but John Christian Rosenlund’s crisp photography elevates this above standard offerings. The beautiful Norwegian exteriors do at least some of the heavy lifting in this regard, but it makes a welcome change from Los Angeles skyscrapers, and adds a distinctive Scandinavian flavour to the mix. While Uthaug doesn’t break any new ground in the disaster movie category, he wrangles its threads to his own world view, leaving us with a timely reminder that this very real scenario could strike at any time.

THE WAVE (BØLGEN) is playing at the Scandinavian Film Festival 5 July – 3 Auaround Australia. Check scandinavianfilmfestival.com.au for times.

2015 | Norway | DIR: Roar Uthaug | WRITERS: John Kåre Raake, Harald Rosenløw-Eeg | CAST: Kristoffer Joner, Thomas Bo Larsen, Fridtjov Såheim, Ane Dahl Torp | DISTRIBUTOR: Madman Entertainment (AUS) | RUNNING TIME: 105 minutes | RATING: ★★★½

July 14, 2016
Review: Dude Bro Party Massacre III (Revelation Film Festival 2016)

It’s the most shocking and brutal of the Dude Bro Party Massacre series to date. Just don’t go looking for the first two.

In the 1980s, a film was created that was so visceral and disturbing that all known copies were destroyed under an executive order from US President Ronald Reagan. Thanks to a cable screening on the Midnight Morning Movie, a young fan’s VHS copy has survived the ravages of time. The film can finally be presented to the public, whether they are prepared for it or not.

At least that’s what the opening scrawl of DUDE BRO PARTY MASSACRE III tells us. In reality, it’s the brainchild of the 5 Second Films collective, an online comedy group with millions of viewers. Their feature is the result of a successful Kickstarter campaign, and it’s a mix of 80s horror tributes, outright parody and the just plain strange. Following previous murders involving the Delta Bis fraternity, survivor Brock is killed by the revived Motherface. Thankfully, his twin brother Brent (Alec Owen) joins the remaining Dude Bros (in a cabin by the lake, of course) to solve this mystery once and for all.

There’s a fine line between parody and just plain bad, and DUDE BRO PARTY MASSACRE III merrily crosses it, stomps on it, and burns it to the ground. Reversing traditional genre gender roles, the titular dudes are dismissive of girls and losing their virginity, and are the first to be picked off by a female killer. Flipping through every horror trope in the book, the film goes one step further by using the same part of the brain pan that cooked up Adult Swim’s Too Many Cooks. We watched that repetitive and bizarre sitcom parody because the archetypes were familiar, but the execution (both literal and figurative) had its movie-literate tongue firmly in cheek. Here the filmmakers don’t simply recreate a horror film from the era, but subvert it with over-the-top surrealism and beautiful non-sequitur moments (“Help! I’m trapped in a basement and forced to write subtitles!”). The train-of-thought approach is almost too much of a good thing, stuck somewhere between a feature-length YouTube skit and the Wet Hot American Summer series.

With constant tracking problems along the bottom of the screen, the movie is designed to mirror the look and feel of 80s video nasties. There’s even snippets of terrible cable infomercials from where the pause button was pressed, a familiar sight to amateur editors of the day. Bad films are usually more fun when the filmmakers aren’t in on the joke, and The Room‘s Greg Sestero stars as if to prove that point. Nevertheless, DUDE BRO PARTY MASSACRE III seems to be an exception to this rule, shamelessly and merrily diving head-first into the kitchen sink of brotastic mayhem.

DUDE BRO PARTY MASSACRE III is playing at the Revelation Perth International Film Festival, 7-19 July 2016.

2015 | US | DIR: Tomm Jacobsen, Michael Rousselet and Jon Salmon | WRITERS: Alec Owen and the cast | CAST: Alec Owen, Patton Oswalt, Paul Prado, Brian Firenzi, Kelsey Gunn | DISTRIBUTOR: Revelation Film Festival | RUNNING TIME: 103 minutes | RATING: ★★★½

July 12, 2016
Review: Gold Coast (‘Guldkysten’) (Scandinavian Film Festival 2016)

An ambitious debut film from Daniel Dencik examines the consequences of colonialism, embracing the madness of the world that it depicts.

The Danish colonial empire was 3,000,000 square kilometres at its apex, including a number of forts and trading posts in India, the Caribbean and Africa. GOLD COAST (GULDKYSTEN) refers to the colonies around the west coast of Africa, primarily modern day Ghana, which was the centre of the slave trade to the Danish West Indies. Based partly on the letters of the real-life Wulff Joseph Wulff, the film was said to originally involved Sophia Adegnika as a love interest for the character. Yet with Adegnika reportedly falling ill during the filming, what we get is something far more cerebral in its execution.

Idealistic botanist Wulff (Jakob Oftebro, TV’s 1864) arrives in Danish Guinea full of hope and plans to start up a commercial coffee plantation. As he begins to work with the native inhabitants of the area, actively defying the colonialism of the day, his bright-eyes and bushy tail run smack-bang into the corrupt forces that act to keep the empire well-lubricated and functional. In an odd sort of way, it’s a musing on the very real and continuing practices of exploitation and slavery, played out within this band of dark history that Danish filmmakers are increasingly willing to explore the edges of.

One of Wulff’s observations is that “The very nature of time is different” in his new world, and the same could be said for Dencik’s film. There’s an undeniable stylistic similarity to Terrence Malick, especially considering the latter’s subject matter in The New World. As Wulff’s outlook becomes far more philosophical and inward-looking, the comparison becomes more apt, and our awareness of the passing of time becomes far more flexible. Events begin to happen to Wulff rather than him being an active participant, with the back half of the film playing out like a fever dream. It’s undoubtedly a lyrical way of examining an historical event. Indeed the film begins with a scene of Wulff being urinated on by captors, and the first part of GOLD COAST is spend bringing us to this moment. Yet it’s also handled without Malick’s finesse, rapidly drifting into a directionless melee, with the inevitable confrontation having very little control once it gets started.

Elements of Angelo Badalamenti’s (Twin Peaks) atmospheric score holds the film together thematically at least, punctuated as it is by a disconcertingly pulsing modern beat at key moments. Cinematographer Martin Munch punches well beyond his television and short film origins, and his otherworldly shots bring the film closest to the Malickian vibe (by way of Emmanuel Lubezki) that Dencik craves. By it’s very structure, GOLD COAST is abstract in nature, and difficult to quantify in any concrete way. If it’s less than the sum of its parts, it’s certainly not due to any earnestness on Dencik’s part.

THE GOLD COAST (GULDKYSTEN) is playing at the Scandinavian Film Festival 5 July – 3 Aug around Australia. Check scandinavianfilmfestival.com.au for times.

2015 | Denmark | DIR: Daniel Dencik | WRITERS: Daniel Dencik, Sara Isabella Jønsson Vedde | CAST: Jakob Oftebro, Danica Curcic, John Aggrey | RUNNING TIME: 114 minutes | RATING: ★★★

July 10, 2016
Review: The Whispering Star (Revelation Film Festival 2016)

Sion Sono’s hypnotic, lo-fi journey through the stars is a wholly unique experience, and an amazing accomplishment in visually-driven storytelling.

It’s possible Japanese director and avant garde artist Sion Sono never stops making films. Indeed, credited with 6 features in 2015 alone, many of them disappear in the international market, so it’s always a treat when one of them features at our many festivals. His films to date have been taste-pushing and overindulgent forays into sex and violence (Guilty of Romance), four hour epics in the case of Love Exposure, or more emotional character-focused studies (Himizu). With THE WHISPERING STAR, Sono delves into science-fiction territory, and proves to be a master of that as well.

Set in an universe where 80% of the population is made up of androids. The film follows a female unit named Yoko (Megumi Kagurazaka) whose job it is to deliver parcels to distant human outposts. Each trip takes years to make, and the ship itself looks like a traditional Japanese house with an engine on the back of it. Her only companion, and one of the handful of whispered voices in the film, is the ship’s computer. Shot in stark black and white, the real-life devastated area of Fukushima doubles as the alien landscapes she visits in this lo-fi sci-fi flick.

Science-fiction works best when it is commenting on human issues, and Sono has been exploring the unspeakable losses of a post-Fukushima Japan since at least Himizu, along with a fictive version in 2012’s The Land of Hope. Where those films explored the societal fallout in a post-disaster setting, this goes one step further to explore humanity via a post-human narrative. Simple repetition, opening on a pot of tea being boiled over the course of a week (or is it 7 different pots being prepared?), not only messes with our notion of time but sets the tone early. We are witnessing the echoing fragments of humanity, androids imbued with our habits. Yoko deliveries contain knick-knacks and other human ephemera, eliciting emotive responses from recipients who had almost forgotten their meaning. Yoko herself is human enough to catch a cold, feeling odd moments of curiosity, all the while replacing her own AA batteries when she senses a malfunction.

Shot in high-contrast black and white, there’s a little bit of Andrei Tarkovsky in the genes of this film, representing something of a departure from Sono’s earlier excesses. The stunning and unreal exteriors of the ship/house are like a hyper-real Georges Méliès on crack, while Hideo Yamamoto’s (The Grudge, Audition) crisp photography of Fukushima’s landscapes contrast their understated chaos against the slate-grey of the skies. The handful of humans in these environments, actually cast from the region, can be seen as either the last vestiges of humanity or artifacts themselves. Sound design is just as deliberate, with the taciturn dialogue never raising above a whisper, even when Yoko is recording her thoughts on a reel-to-reel tape deck. On one planet, any sound above 30 decibels is outlawed, and all human interaction is seen in silhouetted shadowplay.

THE WHISPERING STAR is one of Sono’s most mature works to date, not simply because it is free of the sexualised violence that has dominated those works released outside of Japan. Sono’s frequent collaborator Kagurazaka is terrific in the lead, a thematic extension of the restrained housewife in Guilty of Romance. It’s a film that allows viewers to explore the space in between moments, all the while reminding us to ask how humans can continue to define themselves in the wake of a massive tragedy that took away many of the things that defined that humanity.

2015 | Japan | DIR: Sion Sono | WRITERS: Sion Sono | CAST: Megumi Kagurazaka, Kenji Endo, Yûto Ikeda | DISTRIBUTOR: Revelation Film Festival | RUNNING TIME: 100 minutes | RATING: ★★★★

July 5, 2016
Review: Maggie’s Plan

Wholly conscious of its own formula, Rebecca Miller’s film embraces it in this satirical look at modern indie films.

“She’s wonderful but destroying my life,” enthuses Ethan Hawke’s character in MAGGIE’S PLAN, speaking about his wife with a line that could have been lifted straight out of one of Woody Allen’s “early, funny” films. That’s certainly the vibe that Rebecca Miller’s latest film gives off, her first feature as writer/director since 2009’s The Private Lives of Pippa Lee. It’s a film that wears its indie cred on its sleeve, and likely the only one you’ll see this year (or any other) than involves long conversations about ficto-critical anthropology.

Based on an original short story by Karen Rinaldi, the titular Maggie (Greta Gerwig) makes the decision to abandon all hope of romance and be artificially inseminated by a guy (Travis Fimmel) she knew from college. However, just as she enacts this plan, she begins to fall in love with anthropology professor John (Ethan Hawke). After leaving his intellectual wife Georgette (Julianne Moore), a Columbia University Professor, years go by and Maggie realises that she may be falling out of love with Ethan. From here, she hatches a new plan to get Georgette and John back together.

MAGGIE’S PLAN dives deep into the pretentious, and embraces every moment of it. Maggie’s would-be insemination donor is a pickle entrepreneur. Both she and John work for the New School. There’s a party sequence set around a Arcade Fire-esque group in Canada performing Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing In the Dark.” It feels like a parody, and Miller’s script is unquestionably a farcical take on the conventions of the genre. Maggie herself might have stepped straight out of the 1970s, by way of the mumblecore movement, with her neurotic control freak tendencies both endearing and infuriating. At times she seems insincere in her motivations, but perhaps this is just her uncertainty coming through in a pitch-perfect performance from Gerwig, one that Georgette affectionately describes as “Pure, and a little bit simple.” It is in fact Moore’s Georgette that owns every scene she is in, her precise wardrobe and Danish accent dryly dropping unmistakably self-aware lines like “Nobody unpacks commodity fetishism like you do.”

Shot mostly around the three principals in a handful of locations, the exteriors largely being glory shots of sections of Central Park, the supporting cast of Bill Hader and Maya Rudolph manage to defy ‘best friend’ archetypes. Indeed, there’s a lot of MAGGIE’S PLAN that defies the conventions of the romantic comedy, not least of which is that it explores the realities of a romance over time, and is actually quite funny to boot. Schedule some time in your plans for this refreshingly honest film.

MAGGIE’S PLAN is released on 7 July 2016 in Australia from Sony Pictures Releasing.

2015 | US | DIR: Rebecca Miller | WRITERS: Rebecca Miller | CAST: Greta Gerwig, Ethan Hawke, Julianne Moore, Bill Hader, Maya Rudolph, Travis Fimmel | DISTRIBUTOR: Sony | RUNNING TIME: 99 minutes | RATING: ★★★¾

June 28, 2016