Review: MIFF ‘10: Trash Humpers, Certified Copy, The Red Chapel
Trash Humpers
Dir. Harmony Korine
Reality TV à la Jerry Springer has given a platform to misfits, fringe hangers, trailer trash and psychopaths since way back. Harmony Korine pushes this further in Trash Humpers, the premise being something like ‘let’s give these psychos the camera, too’.
The product* is grainy footage tracing a band of elderly anarchists through suburban streets at night, acting on all their vile whims. Imagine nan and pop in drag, and on a lot of pills. They hump bins/trees/prostitutes and perform inane poetry:
make it, make it,
(don’t shake it)
make it, make it,
(don’t take it)
They play to the camera, producing at times those sublime moments of reality TV vanity:
- dis shit -
- is too hot -
for teeveeeee
The tragic and disenfranchised subjects of Korine’s former films are here back with a vengeance, pushed to a new extreme. The trash humpers are spinning donuts around society’s fringes, pissing on our gates and humping our letterboxes. Korine reminds us again of our fears of white trash: these monsters are our middle class nightmare, ugly and violent, crawling the streets at night, subverting the status quo in ways we will never know.
Indeed, we can’t ignore the odd serious thought about the political thesis Korine is putting forward. But we are dragged down as Korine appeals to the nihilistic stoner humour in us all (just like the Jackass franchise did), and we have to admit that we find ‘dumb people doing stupid shit’ pretty funny.
*(of course it is a faux documentary)
- Emma Jane McNicol
Certified Copy
Dir. Abbas Kiarostami
Why this film, why now? It’s difficult not to ask that question when watching Certified Copy. While Jafar Panahi sat in prison, while the various members of the Makhmalbaf family continued to make films addressing the current political climate, and while turmoil persisted on the streets of Tehran, the great master of Iranian cinema went traipsing around Tuscany with Juliette Binoche and some English actor (William Shimell), making a film about art, marriage, life and whatever.
This concern, however inescapable, is tremendously unfair to Abbas Kiarostami, who is as ferociously committed to his art as anyone has ever been, and who never makes a film that is not resolutely his own. However concerned we may be by the disparity between the world he has chosen to depict here and the one he has left behind, there can be no doubt that the decision to make this film now was the decision of an artist committed to his work, who felt that this was the film he needed to make.
But perhaps that sense of certainty, mastery and directorial control are what constitute the real problem that many, myself included, have with this film, rather than the seeming pointlessness and frivolity of its ‘story’ of a meeting between two bourgeois Europeans amid the beauty and artistic riches of the Tuscan landscape. Kiarostami’s films have always been about chance, both at the level of their narrative content (so many stories, since Where is My Friend’s Home or even earlier, of people looking for something or someone, and coming upon them unexpectedly, or coming upon something else instead, by chance) and at the level of their actual production (in Ten, he sets up the cameras inside the car and then lets the actors drive off and devise the scene themselves); whereas here we find that nothing whatsoever has been left to chance, all is precise, clear and meaningful.
When, towards the end of the film, we get a shot of an old couple walking slowly towards the camera, leaning on each other in support, it seems for a moment that we might be allowed a few seconds without meaning, without thematic resonance – two people walking in silence, not even interacting with our central characters, what could the overarching design be in that? But of course, the old couple have a role to play in it all, as exemplars of something called love, or care, or togetherness, which may or may not truly exist, depending on which side in the Binoche-Shimell debate you take.
The most violent attack on the film on these grounds has come from Eugenio Renzi, who considers Certified Copy the absolute opposite of Jean-Luc Godard’s great Film Socialisme (also screening at MIFF), a film that uses its images to investigate, to open out the world, to allow the spectator to become a “citizen of images.” Kiarostami’s film is so despotic and closed off, according to Renzi, as to warrant an alternative title: Film Capitalisme. While it remains to be seen if such vitriol can be justified, there is no doubt that this film signals some kind of shift in Kiarostami’s work, a shift that not everybody is going to like.
- Conall Cash
The Red Chapel
Dir. Mads Brugger
Is it possible to be ethical and make good art? This is a question I have often pondered, and which resurfaced watching The Red Chapel. All art involves some form of deception, exploitation or appropriation of what does not belong to the artist – whether it be an image, a sound, a person. There is no doubt that Mads Brugger, the Danish director who dragged his two Korean-Danish comedian friends (he is also their manager) to North Korea on a quest to expose the true evil at the heart of it’s dictatorship – through slapstick comedy – has none. And it definitely would not have been as interesting a film if he did; it would not have been a film at all, in fact.
As seemingly self-aware as Brugger is, using a running narrative to ponder, wryly, how he might be manipulating his friends, and how it might be wrong to play into the (constant, overwhelming) behaviour controls of the North Koreans who are hosting him, it is also clear that he is as driven by ideology as they are. On several occasions, he reminds himself and comedians Jacob Nosser and Simon Jul, whenever he has a weak moment of empathy for his pathetic yet menacing hosts, of the billions who have died at the hands of this regime, and the enforced labour camps which undoubtedly are hidden just beyond those hills… The problem is, we never see any proof of that in this film. So his appalling deception of his hosts, and constant kow-towing to the regime, is only as justified as the similar behaviour of an upstanding North Korean bureaucrat – by faith in what he believes, but has no evidence for, and by fear.
In fact, it is Mads who would make the ideal citizen of a totalitarian regime: it is he who immediately and consistently succumbs to the pressure to conform, to not rock the boat. Meanwhile, Jacob and Simon both have breakdowns at various points related to their discomfort: at the ever-more demeaning concessions they must make to their dignity; at having to constantly deceive their hosts, who have been welcoming and kind, despite their absurd censorship and propagandist tendencies; and at the horrific realisation of the intense conditions North Koreans are living in, and their own inability to do anything about it. If the film was made with ethical and empathetic considerations in mind, they would’ve packed up and left a couple of days in. If they were citizens of North Korea it’s not hard to imagine who would flourish and who would flounder.
Undoubtedly, there is something strange and fucked up about North Korea, and they capture enough footage of eerily empty city streets, clapping, automatonic school children, and displays of military might to give anyone the willies. What you do see only makes you wonder what is being hidden. The Red Chapel was brilliant, but, it must be said, this was as much for the questions it was unaware of as for those it believed it was raising.
- Jessie Scott
goran
06/08/10 - 12:30 AM
Panahi is one of my favourite living filmmakers – I even prefer him to Kiarostami – and while he was in prison I was extremely angry. But just because Certified Copy does not address Iran’s political climate, this hardly means it’s a failure. Especially since it has such emotional and intellectual heft. It’s hardly a European lark for christssake. I don’t get the vitriol. Or I do, but I find it misses the point.
And for me, it was Certified Copy that opened up a world, while Film Socialism exploited an entire one.
Conall Cash
06/08/10 - 2:48 AM
Goran:
My review was rather hurriedly written and awkwardly structured, so your partial misunderstanding of my argument is perhaps understandable. As I quite deliberately attempt to set out, what is troubling about this film is not what might be perceived as waywardness or frivolity or lack of clarity – the kind of criticism that might be offered by people angered by its art movie trappings, its bourgeois milieu and its apparent divorce from any kind of social reality, including that of Kiarostami’s country – but quite the opposite. Namely, the precision, the exactness, the ‘absolutism’ even. There is a symmetry and a ‘plottedness’ to the film that I find disturbing; and in this I agree with Renzi that it is a world away from Godard’s film, which is a film that cares about the nature of its images, about how they are produced and what can be done with them. That is not something I get from Certified Copy.
I began my review by evoking the kind of easy criticism that Certified Copy might receive, and then acknowledged the unfairness of such criticism, instead arguing that the problem with the film lies elsewhere, not in its frivolity and slightness but in its precision and its weight. You seem not to have followed, or to have ignored the last two steps of that argument. For this reason, the “emotional and intellectual heft” you speak of is not an antidote to my argument about the film, but is exactly what troubles me about it. When has a Kiarostami film ever before announced its themes and its meanings and its intellectual content so loudly and so obviously? What bothers me about this film is obviously not that it is ‘not political’ – Kiarostami has never made a film that is directly ‘about’ Iranian politics, and there’s no particular reason why he should – but rather the politics of its form, which I find troubling and at odds with everything I love about Kiarostami (even though, at a superficial level, it looks a lot like any other Kiarostami film – he has certainly not traded in his style for a ‘European’ one, and the criticisms that have been made of the film on the grounds of its supposed ‘European-ness’ and aping of ‘art movie’ style do indeed miss the point). I would certainly like to be convinced otherwise, but my immediate reaction to this film is one of disappointment and confusion.
Eloise
06/08/10 - 3:23 PM
Jessie, I saw The Red Chapel very differently to you. I don’t think that Mad Brugger having no ethical awareness (whether he did or did not) was an issue. His appearance to abide by North Korean ideology does not, I think, suggest a secret or shameful attempt to uphold such ideology himself. What it reflects is the total scariness of North Korea and the absolute lack of autonomy that plagues all citizens of the north, and all travellers within it-Brugger was being smart. If Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four taught us anything, it is that trying to reach out of such a strict ideological regime is basically akin to suicide.
In this way, I appreciated what Brugger was trying to do. Taking Simon and Jacob to NK was of course confronting, but personally necessary. Their comedy, and their somewhat-lighthearted acceptance of NK’s environment was entertaining. What made me uncomfortable in that screening was the amount of laughter than such comedy elicited. Because while the humour is there, its major purpose is to convey just how little hope any North Koreans have.
jessie
06/08/10 - 4:08 PM
I think we basically agree with each other Eloise! I don’t mean to imply that a lack of ethics was reprehensible. In fact I’m saying I think it was neccessary to make the film. Mads put his friends through a trauma- a trauma he appeared to be able to evade himself- yes cos he’s smart, but also cos he had an overriding belief that what he was doing was right. He was taking a gamble that the ends would justify the means. All artists/all people have to decide how they are going to negotiate ethics on some level. I think it was more powerful because of it, because he pushed his friends to keep going. It really was genuinely frightening, and that came across not because Mads quoted factotums, but because (particularly)Jacob’s breakdown evidenced it.
BTW- I’m not aware of anyone writing for this blog possessing psychic powers…so short of conducting a survey post screening, I think we should stop making assumptions about what audiences are thinking. People laugh for all kinds of reasons- nerves, fear, shock beings some. You don’t know what that laughter gave way to later on, and whatever our opinions are about a film, we shouldn’t be proscribing “right” ways and “wrong” ways of responding.
Maggie
08/08/10 - 1:50 PM
Hey Emma – I saw Trash Humpers yesterday. It was a very weird screening – someone told me there were 62 walk outs and a fight broke out a few rows back from me about how everyone was checking their phones. In the first 15 or 20 minutes, I was expecting it to be gratiuituously ‘weird’, with shot after shot of geriatric freaks with limber bodies humping everything in sight and was already bored. You are right, it is nihilistically funny, and made me feel 17 again, back when I was all punky and rebellious and would have thought this was the best thing ever.
Then it got more sinister when we see a dead body and the camera man laughs, and I realised it’s not actually a ‘doco’ we are watching, but a home video from the POV of one of this trio of wandering, bored freaks haunting the suburbs and performing their every whim. As he explains towards the end, driving around the burbs in his car, they are truly free and he feels sorry for all the people in their houses (whom we never see in this film). The Trash Humpers have passed over all intellectual coherence, or moral vestige, and this is what Harmony Korine imagines humans are reduced to without all that padding. What a fun guy!
I know some of the creepiness is just stoopid and played for effect, but I think the VHS look and stop-start editing is perfect for this film and must have been soooo cheap to make. The lack of chronology had me begging for it to be over, yet I was hypnotised by it, by their incessant chanting and rooster-laughing and I think the scenes were times perfectly. It’s genius and possibly my favourite film of the festival so far. And I know Jessie will kill me for trying to guess what the audience was thinking, but I actually handed out a detailed ‘reaction’ survey afterwards and I know for fact that everyone was deeply uncomfortable.
Charles
09/08/10 - 1:08 PM
“…and a fight broke out a few rows back from me about how everyone was checking their phones…”
I don’t think it was a fight but rather a man just yelling at others. It was strange though, he shouted with such great hostility, as though he was going to follow up with a punch. About forty minutes into the film, all of a sudden I hear from the other end of row behind me, ‘Turn off your phone, you fucking cunt, it’s disrespectful to the film, you wanker.’ That was it word-for-word. I thought he was talking to the couple sitting in front of him, four seats over from me, but I guess he might’ve been talking to the entire audience (and said ‘cunts’ instead of ‘cunt’…), which would make a little more sense given how loud he shouted.
The couple made no movement after he shouted, there was no murmuring or anything, but ten minutes later they got up and just left. The man who shouted earlier, said to them then: “That’s right, walk out! Walk out while you can still walk!” The male half of the couple leaving then said back to him, almost under his breath, ‘This is free country, asshole.’
I wonder whether there was anything more to it. I thought the guy shouting was in the wrong, he seemed really over the top, but maybe he was in the right somehow… I’m genuinely curious as to know more. I looked at the guy at the end of the film and he seemed like a normal-looking man, in his twenties, maybe a slight ‘hipster’ sort.
As to the film, I like Korine very much but I was expecting this film to be boring for the most part, or at least the sort of film where you look at your watch every now and then, but no, I found it all strangely compelling. It is perhaps my favourite films of the year.
Maggie
11/08/10 - 6:23 AM
Ha! Thanks for more insights to the mystery of the Trash Humpers screening. To add to that, my friend who I saw the film with reckons this mean guy who yelled actually chucked something at the back of the head of the guy sitting next to my friend, who was reading from his iphone throughout the film. Said friend had to sit with his arm blocking his own peripheral vision because the light from the phone was so annoying, so he was kind of glad when the agressive yeller took action. I could see iphone lights lighting up all around the cinema throughout the film. (This is probably the first MIFF where the iphone was out in full force, tweeting their little elctronic hearts out.) Anyway, I was much too interested in the film to pay attention to all that shit!