Screen Machine

Feature: MIFF Diary, Day 3: The indignities of employment, the importance of caffeine

Though the duo of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet are best known as intellectual filmmakers beloved by a small group of similarly intellectual cinephiles, their 1984 film Class Relations—an adaptation Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel “Amerika”—is perhaps the most relatable film I’ve seen at this year’s Melbourne International Film Festival, at least to those who know the special indignities of being an employed person. Its scenes of workers being hauled into managers’ offices and raked across the coals with absurd accusations and questions hit close to home in the most painfully funny way possible.

Another very relatable moment happens late in the film when the young protagonist is talking to a student who spends all day working at a store and all night reading books. When asked at what point he fits in sleep, the student replies that at least until he finishes his studies, he will simply be drinking coffee. Coffee gets a bad wrap these days what with the fun we make of latte-sipping yuppies. What we need to do is reclaim coffee as the beverage of the working classes! For it is caffeine which fuels the long shifts and late nights that drive our society. It is blessed caffeine that is fuelling me through the festival as I trudge along to that 60-film mark! You all know how it is — even in films that you are really enjoying, your body will sometimes just not let you stay awake during a film. For reasons of convenience and poverty, I have acquired a stainless steel vacuum flask that I fill with coffee each morning and sip on throughout the day as needed to help fight the fatigue of spending all day watching films and late nights writing these diary entries for your pleasure.

After a five hour sleep and a rushed morning, caffeine got me through Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, a gorgeously naive yet complex film and definitely the best cinematic take on the classic fairytale (though one can dream of a version by Catherine Breillat to complete a fairytale trilogy).

Tomboy is a great film about an androgynous girl on the cusp of adolescence who moves with her family to a new town where she tries to pass herself off to her new friends as a boy. I’m a sucker for films about children and this is an especially good one because French director Celine Sciamma is so good at capturing the rhythms of children — their gestures, the way they interact, the way they play in such a serious, excited or bored manner. This is often a hard thing for films to get right. (The banter between children in, for example, Super 8 is so essential to the film’s success yet seems so strained.)

I didn’t even need caffeine for The Yellow Sea, an extremely violent crime action film from Korean director Na Hong-jin. It is yet another example of Asia’s excellent genre films. What makes The Yellow Sea so interesting, as with many other genre films from Asia, is how the specificity of the place and the social antagonisms are crucial to driving the narrative. This one is about a taxi driver struggling to pay off the debt for his wife’s visa to South Korea. She has since disappeared and when a local crime boss offers him a large sum of money to travel to South Korea and carry out a hit, he is drawn into a series of violent and tense scenarios.

The only film I fell asleep in today was Fred Schepisi’s The Eye of the Storm and, to be honest, I let myself fall asleep during it because unless I missed something important (altogether possible) it seemed like a perfectly middlebrow drama about eccentric aristocrats who have existential crises and learn the value of good down-to-earth blue-collar living. (Not to dissimilar to that awful movie Up in the Air.)

I did manage to stay awake during Simon Crean’s introductory speech for The Eye of the Storm in which he told us that a creative society is a productive society and that economic factor is what really drives the government’s support of MIFF. The packed audience was on fire. They weirdly applauded after the MIFF trailer which, according to my drinking game rules, means I got to take a swig of whatever drink I had brought with me but by then I had run out of coffee.

FILMS WATCHED:

• Beauty and the Beast — Jean Cocteau
• Class Relations — Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet
• Tomboy — Céline Sciamma
• The Eye of the Storm — Fred Schepisi
• The Yellow Sea — Na Hong-jin

PREVIOUS MIFF DIARY ENTRIES:

• Day 1: Drinking games, anticipation
• Day 2: On the value of film festivals, love, outcasts

Brad Nguyen is a co-editor of Screen Machine. He studied Cinema Studies at the University of Melbourne, was the film reviewer for Triple R Breakfasters and has written for Senses of Cinema.

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