Screen Machine

Feature: MIFF Diary, Day 5 & 6: Man is alone!

In Ozu’s final film An Autumn Afternoon, a character says with good-humoured resignation, “Solitary, sad — after all, man is alone,” and the film with similarly good-humoured resignation bears out the truth of his words. But of course the film carries its melancholic attitude with a warmth, humour and grace characteristic of all Ozu’s work.

Man may be alone, but one sometimes gets the feeling at the Melbourne International Film Festival that some punters would much prefer to be alone. Before a screening of Post Mortem, an old man sitting next to me crossly told the person in front of him to turn off his phone and then told me off for talking with my friend, all during the advertisements! I could partially sympathise with him though. I too get irritated by people talking in the cinema but it’s not immediately before the film starts but rather immediately after the film ends. It’s at this point while I’m still sifting through the complexities of the images and sounds I’ve just experienced that hearing people give their judgements so quickly seems so overbearing to me.

As it turned out, all the films I saw these last two days paid tribute to our ultimately lonely existences. (A film festival that, as it turns out, is not so “festive”?) With Post Mortem, Pablo Larrain has made a wonderfully enigmatic film about a morgue worker who pursues a love interest against the backdrop of the 1973 military coup d’etat that removed the democratically elected Socialist President Salvador Allende from power. The morgue worker’s romantic fixation keeps him blind to the historic events around him until those events can no longer be kept at bay and we are left with a provocatively long shot of man alone with the consequences of his actions.

The Unjust is an excellent Korean crime drama about the conflicting interests of a public prosecutor and a cop, both with a serious lust for career advancement. The film advances at a fast pace, developing a significant cast of characters with a resulting portrait not just of two ambitious people fated to solitude, but of the way their solitude is socially constructed by the institutions of law and commerce. The other Korean film I saw, End of Animal, also ends with its central character (a pregnant young woman stranded in a harsh countryside) all alone. It’s a pretty good first film for Jo Sung-Hee that mixes together intriguing elements but settles on a rather ordinary dog-eat-dog worldview in contrast to the social critique of The Unjust.

The element of social critique is there in A Stoker, a morbid film about a Soviet war hero who spends his declining years in a St Petersburg building tending to a furnace to earn money for his materialistic daughter and provide a handy disposal point for the bodies collected by the mob. What would be an unremittingly bleak and vicious portrait of jealousy, greed, brutal competition and murder becomes something of a strange black comedy thanks to the soundtrack — the Eurotrashy, Latin-flavoured, propulsive beats of Didula (also seen on a television in the film). What does the music do in A Stoker? It grounds the film in a specific time—the 1990s, which saw rapid privatisation and liberalisation of Russia’s economy—and it also operates to frame the violent events of the film not as a “story of the underground” but as part of a mania stretching out through society and breaking down communal bonds. The question that lingers after A Stoker, as with Post Mortem and The Unjust: Where does evil come from?

Michael may be one of the more boring films about evil at this year’s festival, a self-consciously unsensational film about a pedophile and the routines of his life as a whitecollar worker who happens to have a little boy locked away in his basement. One is, of course, going to be reminded of Hannah Arendt’s phrase, “the banality of evil” while watching Michael, but one should remind one’s self that this phrase in its original context is anything but banal. The idea that evil is carried out by ordinary people carries with it the idea that evil is constructed and the desire to analyse how society produces evil. Writer-director Markus Schleinzer is not at all interested in the origins of evil. He seems content to tell us that Michael is just like us — that he eats, has sexual anxieties and listens to pop music. This is all well and good, but so what?

I ended last night with Mysteries of Lisbon, a sumptuous four-and-a-half-hour period drama from Raul Ruiz (edited down from a six-part television miniseries). Through the course of the session, I experienced a labyrinthine web of interconnected stories about absent parents, betrayals, lost love and assumed identities. The film ends, of course, with the image of a man dying alone on his deathbed. But the most important events in Mysteries of Lisbon concern not solitude but a person telling the story of their sorrow to another. Man may be alone, but in Mysteries of Lisbon it is that loneliness that mysteriously binds us all together. What better analogy for my experience of the film festival these past few days: stories of loneliness that we tell each other so that we might learn something of how to be together.

FILMS WATCHED:

• Post Mortem — Pablo Larrain
• End of Animal — Jo Sung-Hee
• The Unjust — Ryoo Seung-Wan
• A Stoker — Alexei Balabanov
• An Autumn Afternoon — Yasujiro Ozu
• Mysteries of Lisbon — Raul Ruiz
• Michael — Markus Schleinzer

PREVIOUS DIARY ENTRIES:

• Day 1: Drinking games, anticipation
• Day 2: On the value of film festivals, love, outcasts
• Day 3: The indignities of employment, the importance of caffeine
• Day 4: On the problem of relating to films

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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