I recently endured While You Were Sleeping, a 1995 romantic comedy starring Sandra Bullock. Sandy B. Bullock works at a toll booth at a grey Chicago train station; she is very lonely, and wears beanies because she is sad. Her day is brightened by the smile of an attractive businessman (Peter Gallagher, whom we now recognize as yummy daddy Sandy from The OC). One freezing Christmas morning, Bullock and Yummy Daddy have the station to themselves, until two muggers arrive. In awesomely incongruent Jersey accents (I do believe this film is set in Chicago):

Mugger 1 taunts, “Noice Jaaaaket.”

Mugger 2 corroborates, “Meeeeehhhry Krysmussss.”

Yummy daddy falls on the tracks! Bullock saves Yummy Daddy’s life by rolling him out of the way of the oncoming train.

Later, at the hospital, a cheery nurse mistakes Bullock for the fiancé of (now comatose) Yummy Daddy, and introduces Bullock to his ‘carrraazyyy’ (but warm-hearted) family with this title. Bullock, being so very shy/bumbling/sweet/small town/fatherless/lonely (“I’m so lonely – cooooooo – that I’d prefer to lie and pretend I’m a coma man’s fiancé than comply with basic standards of honesty”), does not correct them, most definitely lying by omission. From here on out, Bullock attends Coma Man’s family Christmas, fabricates cute stories about their past, and even begins to assume girlfriend/fiancé duties, gaining access to his apartment to feed his cat.

As Coma Man’s family becomes progressively more and more fond of Sandy, I suppose we (the audience) are supposed to forgive this rather psychopathic conduct on account of her winter woolies and vague rendition of ‘sweetness’. I think I understand the logic.

If

x: lady appears sweet and non-offensive

Then

y: It is cool to lie to a dying man’s family, claiming that you know/are engaged to him.

As my 13 year old sister pointed out, Bullock’s deception is a more appropriate premise from which to launch a thriller or horror film. This narrative exploits a real-life fear – that the abuse of those we trust is a greater violation than the dangerous potential of strangers. Horror films often rely on this fear, making the protagonist ultimately distrust those closest to them – sometimes even themselves.

The funnest thing about WYWS is that the film does not wish us to understand this premise as an act of terror. This narrative is presented within the formally pleasant characteristics of a bourgeois family drama, repressing this weird premise whilst maintaining a polite bourgeois distance from its dickhead subjects. Incredibly lame visions of how a ‘boisterous’ family (soooo ‘friendly’ and ‘mad’!) should be – the (acceptably) loopy nanna in her paper Christmas hat (not that loopy when it is Christmas); the token teenage daughter who acts and dresses awkwardly childlike (a far cry from my teenage Christmases, which definitely involved more champagne theft).

The film’s family-friendly veneer presents dishonesty as an acceptable element to an archaic notion of feminine ‘passivity’, and promotes deception as a suitable premise from which one can establish a romantic bond. Alfred Hitchcock tapped into this black intersection of the gore and the ‘giddy’ much earlier on with his 1955 film The Trouble with Harry, in which widow X and man Y fall in love over the corpse of her husband. WYWS carries on, presenting lies and perversion as normality, hiding them, as the film itself comes to embody an arena of middle class repression.

I suppose the rom com must repress a lot of the truths propelling it forward – that the manner in which people in love behave isn’t usually very funny, or that they wish to follow up that pash on the Empire State Building with a bit of (not quite so innocent) grinding. It is as though WYWS is fighting against its own instinctive forces: whilst it tries so hard to be a politely distanced comedy about the redemptive powers of Volvos and labradors, it fails at concealing its own nature, and these repressed elements slide up to the surface in the most uncomfortable moments for characters and spectator alike.

At one point, Bullock reveals that she knows that Coma Man has only one testicle. Uncle Geoff (aware of Bullock’s charade) mutters, “I don’t want to know how you knew that.” Bullock’s admission reverberates beyond this moment, a reminder of how perverted her position as an admirer of Coma Man is. In this particular moment, all these repressed perversities briefly return to the surface, and Uncle Geoff, along with the spectator, wonders for a sec what the sexual or physical relationship between Bullock and Coma Man actually is.

What if these repressed instincts slid to the surface more often? And were developed? What if we replaced Bullock’s ineloquent bullshit with the immediacy of a horror heroine shrieking? And saw her hop into bed and molest Coma Man?

Is WYWS just a horror flick, albeit one with a truncated narrative and repressed instincts? I wonder whether a horror film can be viewed as the (honest) extenuation of a (dull and repressed) rom com. Perhaps we could replace the title of the film (itself a repressed euphemism, suggesting both that the man was ‘sleeping’ when he was in fact comatose, and that this sleeping subject is the principal object of desire), with something more under the lines of While You Were Comatose, I, A Perfect Stranger, Convinced Your Family That We Knew Each Other, and Were Engaged to be Married, Meanwhile Your Little Bro and I are Keen on Each Other, But You Woke Up and the Fam is Now Convinced That You Have Amnesia (Because You Don’t Know Me), But Don’t Worry, We’re Going to All End Up Happy, or something more concise: Psycho.

Some micro-festivals to sink your teeth into this week: Madman’s Reel Anime festival (including Summer Wars – which we reviewed here -  and the first 2 Evangelion films) begins Thursday while the Singapore Film Festival runs from Saturday 4th to Wednesday 8th.

The doco William S. Burroughs: A Man Within screens at ACMI Thursday through Sunday. Features interviews with Allen Ginsberg, John Waters, Patti Smith, Iggy Pop, Gus Van Sant, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Sonic Youth, Laurie Anderson, Amiri Baraka, Jello Biafra, and David Cronenberg.

More love for Alain Delon this week at Cinematheque on Wednesday with Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers screening alongside Renoir’s early masterpiece, A Day in the Country (Une Partie de Campagne), which of course has nothing at all to do with Delon, having been shot when he was about six months old, but plenty to do with Visconti – along with Jacques Becker and Henri Cartier-Bresson, Visconti worked as Renoir’s assistant director on this film, seven years before he directed his own first film, Ossessione.

Some fun films at the Astor: The Great Escape on Sunday afternoon; Godard’s Contempt and Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom on Sunday night; and parts 4 and 5 of the Cremaster Cycle on Monday.

New films opening this week: Tomorrow When the War Began based on the John Marsden novel and directed by Hollywood screenwriter Stuart Beattie (whose awful trailer tells us that the decision to go to war isn’t a matter of rationalism or intellectualising but rather a matter of “instinct”); The Tumbler which looks like an Australian remake of Three Kings but without that film’s budget or wit, The Kids Are Alright, a film about how lesbians can do the white privilege thing just as well as all you straight couples thank you very much; Going the Distance, a romantic comedy with Justin Long and Drew Barrymore; and Furry Vengeance which, going by the trailer, is not as sexy as the title would suggest.

Just weeks earlier… Eureka! exclaimed director LaBruce upon hearing that the Melbourne International Film Festival had just banned his latest work, L.A. Zombie – a film chronicling the necrosexual escapades of the alien-dead François Sagat (of TitanMen fame). While at first, obviously, almost superficially, we may understand his excitement in regards to the boost in ticket sales that such infamy inevitable generates, is there not a more significant detail missed in our propensity to understand Bad Cinema as merely a political economy?

To shock, to transgress, relies foremost on the ability to sacralise, to separate – to declare a beyond (of taste, decency, morality, etc.) that is ultimately reinforced through the violation of the taboo itself. The power of transgression is thus not to break with Law but to render it visible. Indeed, conversely, as Bataille argues, “if we observe the taboo, if we submit to it, we are no longer conscious of it”.

L.A. Zombie, formally speaking, is not a shocking film. In its modular makeup, its flat repetition, it is obedient to the generic requirements of pornography. Curiously however we fail to judge it as such.

‘Where’s the plot?’ – ‘It could have really ended after the first wound-sagging’ – ‘ That was boring’ – ‘What a shit film’.

Indeed, unlike his previous foray into the pornographic, The Raspberry Reich (2004), there is no structural transgression here – no bending of its hardcore rules (such as the inclusion of a militant sexual politics). As such, content becomes the only criteria for our assessment. Yet is fictionalised gore really that confronting to a generation raised on Two Girls, One Cup, Goatsie and Tubgirl (not to mention the wonders of the Japanese!)?

Yes, the content predictably escalates over the film’s course – there is ropeplay, watersports and a gruesome orgy to finish it off. Sagat’s penis (as one audience member remarked) does indeed look like a dog’s cock. It pisses out blood (blue-black at one point) at a strangely perpendicular angle in place of regular ejaculate. Yet none of this is ever really framed to horrify (unlike the far more terrifying film Antichrist, 2009), let alone arouse its audience.

Still, the experience in itself was most definitely worth it – with MUFF legends and Co. concluding the screening with an ecstatic “We did it!”, ushering an uncertain audience towards massive applause. Yet I still can’t help but feel that the erotics of this evening out at a makeshift porno theatre lay in the situation itself. For that alone the tenacity of Australian Censorship Board cannot be thanked enough.

Season 4, Episode 1: “Public Relations”

Back in season one, it looked like Mad Men might be an ensemble piece. Peggy seemed to get as much screen time as Don, Pete’s inner turmoil was regular grist for the mill and Betty and the Draper children sometimes got whole episodes to themselves. But out here in far season four, we’ve long accepted that this is the Don Draper Show. And to be honest, I think it’s been good for the show to find its focus.

But, having found this focus, it seems clear that season four is going to be all about the deconstruction of the myth of Don Draper. Which is all fine and good and everything, but subtlety is not always Mad Men’s strong suit. Case in point: episode one opens with one of those groan-worthy clunkers the series is so fond of. “Who is Don Draper?” asks the one-legged journo interviewing Don for some advertising trade rag. Gee thanks Matthew Weiner, or should that be CAPTAIN OBVIOUS. It’s worse than that bit in the Halloween episode where the kids were trick or treating and the neighbour looked up and asked Don, “And who are you supposed to be” and there was a lingering pause because, you know, Don’s like, PERFORMING ALL THE TIME AND HIS WHOLE IDENTITY IS A COSTUME ARGH KILL ME NOW I GET IT ALREADY.

Anyway. It’s eleven months after the close of season three and we’re dropped into the brave new world of Sterling Cooper Draper Price, with its crisp white interiors and precarious financial situation. The choice to elide eleven months seems like an odd one. The dramatic change in tone and pace that occurred in the last episode of season three has seemingly been abandoned, along with the sense of forbidden excitement that came with the founding of Sterling Cooper Draper Price (from now on it’s going to be SCDP). Things are definitely different at SCDP, but in many regards it seems to be business as usual. I am a little disappointed.

Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser) is back, staring imploringly out at you from those eyes the colour of non-consensual sex. If Kartheiser tells you he can get the red wine stain out, you may as well just move back to Germany. No sign of Trudy yet. Possibly she’s making out with Jeff from Community while Pete’s at work, which would serve him right really. Pete’s kowtowing continues to be one of the funniest things on the show. Though when the alternative is Roger’s superciliousness and Don’s tantrums, he may actually be the one holding the place together.

Peggy (Elisabeth Moss) is looking like she may have had another secret inter-season baby. But sometimes the show just frumps her up for no real reason, so I’ll withhold judgement on that one. I’ve had debates in the past about the nature of Don and Peggy’s relationship. There’s Team One-Day-To-Be-Lovers and Team Platonic and Team Somewhere-In-Between, to which I belong. I would love to see Don and Peggy get it on, but it would be like eating an entire chocolate cake on your own. It’s great while it lasts, but the regrets never leave you. Peggy has a boyfriend now, it’s the mysterious new co-worker we’ve got our eye on… but I can’t help but feel they’re all just stand-ins for Don.

Betty (January Jones) and new husband Francis are still…um…doing whatever it is that they do. The almost total absence of character development for Francis seems to hint that Don’s comment, “Believe me Henry, everyone thinks this is temporary,” may not only be funny, but accurate. The fact that less than a year in they can only get it on when they’re in the car doesn’t bode well. Betty continues to accomplish the impossible by making Don look like parent of the year in comparison. Though I too once pulled a Sally-Draper-Forced-Spew at the table, and I turned out all right. There’s hope for us all.

We’ve checked in with our non-Don major players, but there’s little doubt what this episode is about. Don goes on a date, fails to seal the deal. He can’t convince the family-friendly folks over at Jantzens that it’s time to admit that they’re selling bikinis. He’s living in the world’s saddest bachelor pad. And he’s paying prostitutes to slap him during sex.

This last, though undoubtedly titillating, felt a little like that chocolate cake I mentioned earlier. Sure, I enjoyed it, I’m only human, but I felt like this episode was giving us too much too fast. Any one of these things on its own would have got the ball rolling on the “Don Draper is not the man you think he is” trajectory that this season seems intent on, but taken together, it feels like overkill.

Season 4, Episode 2, “Christmas Comes But Once A Year”

Oh good. Glen’s back. Our favourite proto-stalker returns this episode, having apparently transferred his affections from Betty Draper’s hair to her daughter. The scary thing is that, starved of affection as she is, it seems unlikely Sally will muster the strength to rebuff Creepy Glen’s advances.

But Christmas is in the air and that means everyone’s thinking about the family they have, wish they had or perhaps wish they didn’t have. Don receives a letter to Santa from Sally, which he gets his secretary to read aloud to him, raising the hitherto unasked question, Is Don Draper secretly illiterate? I suspect yes. His secretary is suitably touched by Sally’s desire to have her dad home for Christmas, though it’s debatable whether he was actually around any more before the divorce than he is now.

Over at SCDP Freddy “Is-That-Urine-Running-Down-Your-Leg-Or-Are-You-Just-Happy-To-See-Me” Rumsen is back, sober, and bearing a much-needed client. But apparently A.A. doesn’t have a 12 Step program for overcoming misogynistic douchebaggery, so it’s not surprising that he’s soon butting heads with Peggy’s budding feminism. This is 1964 after all and if Don Draper is buying Beatles records for Sally, then the end is closer than they realise.

Again and again, Mad Men presents us with images of the beginning of the end: Peggy taking her place at the conference table; Freddy giving up drinking. But by now we’re familiar with Mad Men’s rock-hard core concept: The more things change, the more they stay the same. Don Draper didn’t disappear, he just adapted. And Peggy is never getting that corner office.

Though there’s no denying that Don isn’t adapting too well at the moment. Operation Deconstructing Don continues in excruciating fashion this episode with the incident of the secretary. We all know sleeping with his secretary is beneath him, but we wouldn’t have thought until now that it was beneath her too. Don’s vile reaction is upsetting not only because he’s being a jerk, but because we would probably not handle it any better. And we want Don to handle it better than we would, that’s what he’s there for. We know Don’s stock is plummeting and even the nurse across the hall would rather get an early night.

Other points of order to be addressed this episode include wondering just how far SCDP will go to keep Lucky Strike on board. Roger dons the Santa suit this time, though he certainly isn’t happy about it. But if Don has to debase himself for the company, things are probably not going to go smoothly.

Peggy’s beau is in for a surprise when her kid turns up. Though how long has it been since we got a glimpse of the secret attic-child? He’s probably 35 by now. Maybe the Mysterious Co-Worker is actually Peggy’s son? And how long can Peggy’s deep ambivalence toward marriage hold out against the onslaught of everyone’s expectations? She may have won the battle against Freddy, but the war’s so big she can’t even see it yet.

Season 4, Episode 3, “The Good News”

Last time Don went to California he very nearly didn’t come back, and it’s not hard to see why. The first Mrs Draper lets Don be Dick for once, rather than just being a dick, which is how things usually go. Anna Draper seems convinced Don is a Nice Guy and so he gets to be, at least for a few stolen hours. More mysterious are Anna’s motives. She seems to love him, but not be in love with him, making her pretty much unique among the women in Don’s life. She also seems to enjoy setting him up with her inappropriately young nieces, which is a whole other mystery, and a pretty creepy one at that.

The big news is that Anna is not long for this world, her broken leg the one visible symptom of late-stage cancer that could kill her any day. A fact that Anna’s sister has kept from her, though Anna is a canny woman and it’s hard to believe she doesn’t have a pretty good idea of what’s going on. Don is left with the decision to tell or not to tell. He decides not to, and I’m still wondering if it was the coward’s way out.

The news of Anna’s illness puts an end to Don’s seduction of her niece, thank god, making it four strikeouts for Don this season by my count. The niece is more cipher than actual person, a mouthpiece for this episode’s take home line: “Nobody knows what’s wrong with themselves. And everyone else can see it right away.” Surely Don’s problem is the exact opposite? No one sees what’s wrong with him until it’s too late. Where is Don going to escape to when Anna’s gone?

Back on the East Coast we finally get a proper catch up with Joan (Christina Hendricks) and Dr. Stupid. If you can stop screaming “YOU COULD DO BETTER” for more than four seconds together you’ll see that Mad Men is pulling a “douchey characters doing nice things” in an effort to flesh out Dr. Stupid, who we actually know little about, other than that he’s a rapist and a subpar doctor. But it’ll take more than one stitched-up finger to accomplish that monumental feat. I think we’re all counting down the days till he gets killed in Vietnam.

After saying goodbye to Anna, probably forever, Don finds an unlikely drinking Buddy in Lane, another character we’ve not seen much of for a while. Yet again the show delights in tearing down and stomping on the facade that is Don Draper. When the stand-up comedians are picking on you, you know the game is up. Lane proves to be about as awkward a partner in debauchery as you’d expect, though the vision of him and Don watching Godzilla together is one I’m going to cherish for some time.

I’m starting to wonder how long the deconstruction of Don Draper can go on for before we get pretty tired of it and want him to pull his shit together. The prediction that he’ll be married within a year is an interesting one… maybe he’ll pull a Sterling and marry poor old Allison the secretary?

Hmm… So many films opening this week that YOU MUST WATCH! (Not really.) Michael Winterbottom’s The Killer Inside Me is a Controversial Movie! MUST WATCH! Avatar Special Edition has a sexy Na’vi sex scene! MUST WATCH! Piranha 3D is an ironic meme-friendly B-movie pastiche! MUST WATCH! (By the way, Saige Walton called Piranha 3D the new Showgirls but it doesn’t look that good.)

On Friday 27th, the Melbourne Writers Festival begins, which has a number of film/televisiony events listed here. Not listed on that particular page but nonetheless exciting is the keynote address from Joss Whedon which is sold out. There’s also a doco on William Burroughs which looks a bit better than the godawful one that showed at MIFF ‘08.

Cinematheque continues its retrospective of films starring Zack Efron’s grandfather Alain Delon with Jean-Pierre Melville’s masterpiece Le Cercle Rouge and Delon’s 1981 directorial debut Pour la peau d’un flic (For a Cop’s Hide).

The Astor is showing Robocop on Sunday! It’s showing with the awfully(awesomely?) titled The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, also starring Peter Weller. On Monday they’re showing part 3 of the Cremaster Cycle.

Also opening this week: Boy, a “whimsical” and “quirky” “coming-of-age story” from “New Zealand” from the director of Eagle Vs. Shark; Vampires Suck, a parody of something or other;  Chak Jawana, a film about the troubled youth of a Punjabi village with “a powerful message on family values, determination and hope”; and The Father of My Children, which looks like a remake of Olivier Assayas’ Late August, Early September (and funnily enough, the film’s director Mia Hansen-Løve acted in that film).

Inception operates at the cutting edge of contemporary narrative comprehension, spectatorial skill and processing speed: a position that will diminish, without fail, over time.  But for now, raising this bar is a film that incites as much contempt (or at least, misunderstanding) as devotion. Observing the crowd at yesterday’s late night screening, one was equally likely to spot neighbours talking as those sitting with shocked, hand-covered faces. There were equal parts distracted shuffling and whiteknuckled seat-grabbing. This is a film guaranteed to polarize.

All in all it follows through on a very simple concept: the idea that at some point in the near future we will be able to enter the dreaming minds of others, a technology developed to allow deadly military training without consequence. The plot itself follows the plans of a team constructed by haunted, master ‘Extractor’ Dominic Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) to implant a certain idea into the head of wealthy industrial heir Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy). Calling upon an ensemble cast (including Ellen Page, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Ken Watanabe and Michael Caine) the film itself enacts its own ‘inception’ – the thought implanted: film-as-dream.

This is indeed an old, and perhaps clichéd notion: yet Inception presents it with a twist. Instead of the solitary state of regular dreaming, through the use of technology a collective dream state can be reached. We must consider the film itself one such state, arising not from the thoughts of the few but those of the many, indeed the all: our collective unconscious. Like the dream, cinema involves the processing of shared motifs, or im-signs (as Pasolini was fond of calling them): cultural memories, traumas and memes which grow in our minds like a cancer, which we spread between one another as a disease.

It is no coincidence that Cobb’s ‘totem’, his assurance of reality, is the spinning top: for this is precisely what human history proves itself to be. Indeed, despite the many social advances since Freud’s time, many of his favourite images and archetypes are littered throughout this film. The ‘Woman’ takes centre stage, the rejection and incompleteness of her idealisation ultimately reaffirming that old Lacanian adage: “il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel” (there is no such thing as the sexual relationship). Two faceless children, a younger brother and older sister, drive the plot forward: the film-work reaching out towards their individuation, their rebirth before an all-too-grateful father. Meanwhile, and perhaps most significantly – given the emphasis on oneiric uncertainty and godlike power – the image of the Other-as-horde (which the film refers to as ‘projections’) manifests our greatest fears that, ignoring the three or four individuals we count as ‘friends’, the world outside our sphere of confort can be overrun at any moment; that a stranger’s sideways glance is an intent to kill. Paranoiacally, we still fear the gaze of others, their ability to pierce our transcendental place beyond: we still believe that only those people known are truly rational.

Yet perhaps historically this is all simply an embodiment of the continuing terroristic ideology of our time. Because of its underlying honesty, Inception is truly one of the greatest blockbusters to be realised this decade.

Only a couple of weeks after the end of MIFF, and another barrage of potentially-somewhat-interesting film events is upon us. The Melbourne Underground Film Festival kicks off on Friday, with an opening night screening of El Monstro del Mar, directed by Stuart Simpson, who MUFF claims is “a major new player in Australian genre cinema.” Rather surprisingly, this opening night screening, along with several others over the course of MUFF, will be happening at the Classic cinema in Elsternwick. The rest of MUFF will be happening at bars in the city. Other events of note at MUFF include a screening of Bruce LaBruce’s L.A. Zombie, which was cancelled at MIFF due to censorship problems, and a “Bret Easton Ellis retrospective,” which will be showing various film adaptations of novels by Ellis.

Friday also sees the opening of what is apparently the fifth annual Indonesian Film Festival, which will be running at ACMI for a week. Opening night film is 7 Hearts, 7 Loves, 7 Women. One of the more interesting films looks to be Shackled Woman, from 1980, which will be screening on Wednesday evening. Wednesday also sees the commencement of this year’s Russian Resurrection festival, which features about twenty new Russian films, along with a fantastic program of classics as part of a “World War II Retrospective,” which includes Andrei Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood, Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes are Flying and Larissa Shepitko’s The Ascent. Unfortunately, like so many of these national cinema festivals, this is all happening at Palace Cinemas, and mostly at the Como, the bourgeois-est cinema of them all. So just remember, if that Tarkovsky’s getting to be a bit much for you, just lean back in your luxuriant lounge chair and take another sip of wine, and it’ll all be okay…

Apart from that, we’ve got Phillip Noyce’s Salt, starring Angelina Jolie, opening on Thursday. The Canadian film Cairo Time, starring Patricia Clarkson, also opens this week. If you haven’t seen them yet, Splice, The Ghost Writer, Greenberg and The Expendables are all hereabouts as well.

The Strange Case of Angelica

Manoel de Oliveira has been thinking of this film, in one form or another, for many decades. As is often the case with the films in which he casts his grandson, Ricardo Trepa, Angelica has an autobiographical tinge: this story of a young photographer who is called upon by a wealthy family to take commemorative photos of the body of their recently deceased, very beautiful young daughter, is said to be inspired by Oliveira’s own experience as a photographer in the 1930s.

Of course, this story of a man who becomes so obsessed with the image of a dead woman that he brings her back to life is one steeped in the history of cinema, calling upon our memory of Otto Preminger’s Laura, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (the greatest story of obsession, the greatest story of cinema, that we have), and those immortal stories of the mania of photographers and cameramen, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup and Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom. Angelica is almost weightless on a certain level, gorgeous in the simplicity of its presentation like all of Oliveira’s late films, but the depth of this history of images and stories is always there, if we dare to look for it.

There seems to always be one moment in an Oliveira film at which I find tears coming to my eyes. In Christopher Columbus, The Enigma, it is the moment when a traffic light changes while the two protagonists are sitting in the back seat of a New York taxi; in last year’s Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl, it’s when Oliveira’s camera begins to track through the rooms of a house and a character is heard reading some lines from a Portuguese poet. In Angelica, this moment happened near the end: after seventy-odd minutes with no camera movement, a sudden, remarkable shift occurs in the narrative, and our photographer, Isaac (played by Trepa), starts to run, as if moving towards his beloved, dead Angelica. As he does so, Oliveira’s camera moves with him, in a series of shots that follow Isaac running out of his house, down streets and alleys, towards Angelica. This sudden bursting into life, coming as it does just minutes before the second of the film’s two deaths, offers one of the few moments of absolute aesthetic bliss, of true cinematic jouissance, to be found at this festival. Oliveira has given us more of these moments than perhaps any other filmmaker; this is one of the many things that we thank him for.

- Conall Cash

Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll

MIFF closing night didn’t share the pomp and ceremony of opening night at the Regent. It was screened in two lumpy-chaired Greater Union cinemas. The one I was in took a while to fill up, and even then it wasn’t a packed house. Popcorn and Choc Top rocked on their knees at the front of the cinema as John Safran opened the film. After pointing out that we were in the pleb cinema (the other one was for invited guests only), he went on a tangent about how someone at opening night told him that Richard Moore is an arsehole, but that Richard had always been a very nice guy to him, but maybe only because he’s on the telly. Then a Myer from the MIFF board got up and gave the obligatory boring but nice speech thanking the volunteers, after which a short, whimsical mockumentary of Choc Top and Pop Corn’s MIFF experience was screened. When that died down, the opening chords of Space Oddity sounded and the ‘Matter of Taste’ duo got up and did some interpretive dancing, and then walked around the cinema mingling with their fans. As they climbed the stairs near us, my cute friend waved at them frantically and told me “I love Popcorn, he’s so friendly!” The whole thing was bizarre, and the en masse, crazy-eyed fatigue of MIFF was absolutely salient.

The closing night film itself was a musical biopic (directed by Mat Whitecross) about Ian Dury, a British new wave punk rocker. Dury’s songs are only familiar to me because of Australian ads of the 80s – the Samboy ad that uses “Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick” and that goddam Spray’n’Wipe ad that uses the rhyming couplet structure of “Billericay Dicky”. Besides being a unique artist who wrote catchy toons and toed the line between spoken word poetry and rock’n’roll, Dury is also known for his polio-induced physical disability and refusal to be moulded into a figurehead for the disabled.

There’s something about seeing a great musician reduced to a biopic that is really damaging – I was seriously burned by Walk the Line and its hideous soundtrack. I thought that because I wasn’t familiar with Ian Dury that this biopic wouldn’t be as disappointing. But it was. It has a great cast: Andy Serkis’ plasticky body and flexible face translate very well from CGI to real life; Olivia Williams is perfectly supportive as usual; and Gareth and Finchy from The Office are both a real treat. The opening credits are fun, punky and Python-esque, and utilised as segues throughout the film. There’s also an interesting narrative device whereby Dury performs elements of his own story from a stage. But style can’t hide the fact that this is at heart a generic biopic, even if it diverges visually from the form. It is like being shoved on a Disney ride and getting force-fed the homogenised formula of someone’s complex, artistic, messy, flawed and dignified life – the worst part of the ride being when the band gathers in a room, a few chords are strummed and suddenly, we segue on to a stage where the crowd is out of control over those humble strains which have now turned into their most famous song.

In my opinion, the only way to watch a generic biopic is at midday, midweek, on the couch, in my pajamas, about a decade after it was made.

- Maggie Scott

Caterpillar

Koji Wakamatsu emerged in the 1960s, associated both with the pinku genre of softcore pornography and with the more artistically vaunted realm of the Japanese New Wave. With films like Vagabond of Sex and Ecstasy of the Angels (the latter of which screened at MIFF last year) he found ways to combine a fascination with sex and violence with the aesthetic and political avant-gardism of the New Wave. In 2010, Wakamatsu is still going, and while Caterpillar sees him working in a considerably more restrained directorial style than his ‘60s classics, the same concerns about sexuality, violence, ideology and their interrelation are at the forefront.

This is an astonishing film, certainly one of the best of the festival. Restricted almost entirely to a single room, we witness the grim reunion between a returning soldier and his wife, Shigeko (Keigo Kasuya), some time during the China-Japan war, not long before Japan’s entry into war with America. The soldier, Lieutenant Kurokawa (Keigo Kasuya), has lost his limbs, his hearing and his speech – a caterpillar that can barely crawl, he requires Shigeko’s attention at every moment. She must give her life over to him, doing her part for the Empire of Japan.

As the true story of how Kurokawa received his injuries emerges, and as war with China leads to a full engagement in World War Two, Wakamatsu develops as searing and devastating a critique of the forces of war as any I can name. At the same time, he brilliantly limits the scope of his story almost entirely to these two individuals, Kurokawa and his wife, and the lifeless lives they each must continue to live in order to perform their required roles. Suicide, an act of bravery on the battlefield, would be a sin at home; and so there is no option but to continue to live, eating and sleeping, eating and sleeping. When Wakamatsu finally, at the very end of the film, ‘zooms out’ from this intense focus to a brief account of statistics detailing the number of lives lost in each battle and at each of the atomic bombings that ended the war, the effect of this combination of elements (a kind of Hitchcockian move, simultaneously zooming out and tracking forward) is truly overwhelming.

- Conall Cash

Nostalgia for the Light

Patricio Guzman’s Nostalgia for the light draws upon the cinema’s unique power to evoke metaphor and analogy, as it documents and reconciles the ongoing activities of three separate groups of people working in the Atacam desert in Chile, providing an emotive and gently intellectual meditation on “the gravity of memory”.

The film establishes the Atacam Desert as the only place in the world with zero humidity, and therefore the clearest skies in the world. This makes the desert a key site for the international construction and maintenance of observatories that can ceaselessly operate, uninhibited by the distorting properties of rainfall and atmospheric moisture.  Throughout the film we see and hear from one of the Chilean astronomers as he casually muses on the grandiose scope of his work, which involves the processing of light and sound data received from deep space (and therefore the distant past) in order to elucidate fundamental problems and questions concerning the origins and nature of not only our being but time and the cosmos itself. Concurrently, we learn that the desert’s unique weather has allowed it to preserve some of the most ancient traces of human activity, including an array of sparse petroglyphs depicting abstract human and animal figures, as well as enormous, strikingly expressive faces carved upon cliff-faces.  It is therefore a key site for the practice of archaeology, and accordingly we see and hear from a wonderfully excitable Chilean archaeologist about his particular take on work that engages the materiality and spectrality of historical and cosmic memory.

Eventually the film begins to work in what is arguably its central concern, the legacy of the murderous Pinochet regime that also distinguishes and marks the Atacam desert. We hear from astronomers who were imprisoned in the concentration camps of the Atacam, who found solace in secretly studying the stars, as well as an architect who famously memorised the exact dimensions of his camp, and was able to completely reconstruct it in his writing and illustrations, after the regime had dismantled and destroyed it. Most importantly we hear from a remarkable group of women who are painstakingly scouring the desert for traces of the thousands upon thousands who went missing during the regime, or who never returned from the camps. Their activities are marked by their personal memories of the immediate past (which, the film implies, is in many ways more distant than the prehistoric past).

Formally, Nostalgia for the Light is relatively straightforward in its construction, with omniscient voiceover narration acting as a suturing device to string together talking-head interviews, shots of the interviewees and their colleagues at work and expressive montage sequences that act as a visual bedding to the spoken content. The film’s narration, however, is strangely personal in its address, related by a narrator who weaves reflections on his own life experiences into the film without vanity, and without detracting from the personal space of contemplation the film allows its viewers and its subjects. The narrator really only gently prompts the film’s exposition, despite providing reflections of his own on the various things he shows us.

What is interesting is that all of the narrators are plainly aware of each other’s existence, freely and casually drawing analogies between different sections of the film and between each other’s work. For example, one of the women says that she wishes their were telescopes that could look into the ground to help her find the bones of the missing. This segues to the scientists explaining how they use calcium readings to distinguish the birth of stars at the dawn of the cosmos. This takes us to the archaeologist delightfully reminding us that the calcium formed at the beginning of the universe is of course the same calcium that has found its way into our bones today.

Parallel to the kinds of work the film documents, the work of the cinema itself is also to examine, preserve and “deal with” the past – particularly the troubled history of the twentieth century, in which the cinema played such a central role. It is of course then the filmmaker himself, and his audience, who make up the fourth group given to traversing the Atacam desert to find a connection to the world and our shared past.

- Alifeleti Brown

The four-day run of Emmanuel Laurent’s Two in the Wave, about the early years of Cahiers du Cinéma and the French New Wave, focusing specifically on its two most famous participants, François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, begins at ACMI on Thursday. The film is narrated by Antoine de Baecque, one of Truffaut and Godard’s major inheritors in French film criticism, and the author of the most authoritative biographies of each of them.

The Melbourne Cinematheque returns, after a few weeks off for MIFF, with the first week of its Alain Delon season. The season begins on Wednesday with an interesting pair of films, René Clement’s Plein Soleil (aka Purple Noon) and the Jean-Claude Carrière-scripted The Swimming Pool (La Piscine), by Jacques Deray.

Sweetgrass

Dir. Lucien Castaing-Taylor

Sweetgrass is a relatively straightforward observational documentary that depicts the intense working experience of a troupe of old-style American drovers as they herd a massive flock of sheep through picturesque mountain ranges to graze on the pastures there. Shot on what looks like standard DV transferred onto 35mm, the film’s beautiful cinematography makes up for its low resolution with inspired compositions that emphasise the vast number of sheep in the troupe’s care (most comically when they are paraded in their thousands through the street of a nearby town). Many shots throughout the film are framed to apprehend the bizarre herd behaviour of the animals and the phenomenally abstract assemblages and patterns they form as they are fed, mustered and driven through the countryside, chaotic yet contained. The low resolution actually comes into its own much later in the film when wild predators in the night begin to cause panic in the expedition, as scenes of the farmers shooting blindly at grainy, distant figures in the night intermittently lend the film the frantic, paranoid quality of The Blair Witch Project.

We are only given a passing chance to identify with the humans. Two drovers, Pat and John are singled out as the key human characters of the film, after fighting between groups of sheep-dogs gives cause for the expedition to be split up. Pat and John are initially revealed through scenes of them snoozing, setting up camp and commanding the animals. Later we begin to spend more time with them in the camp, hearing their thoughts regarding the health of the expedition. Pat is a somewhat taciturn old man, a seasoned cowboy who seems to stoically accept any challenge that befalls the expedition. John is much younger and, whilst as stoic as Pat about the job at hand, is much more prone to stress and worry. Late in the film John begins to lose his grip on the reigns of composure and sanity as he hurls violent and resentful abuse at his recalcitrant flock while driving them up a hill. It is during this late scene and the following, when John sobs on his mobile phone to his mother about the terrible strain being suffered by his horse and his dog (in what feels for a moment like an unwelcome incursion of reality-TV-style histrionics into the films de-dramatised observational mode), that the contemplative and detached tone of the film begins to break down.

By choosing not to reveal the strain on the health of the animals and the cowboys gradually through progressive visual documentation, and by allowing its factuality to suddenly and loudly burst through the film’s beguilingly calm, contemplative surface, the filmmakers shock us into realising that what we might have been casually observing – a heroic journey across an idyllic landscape – is highly problematic, and that the people and animals before us are not merely stoic figures aesthetically framed to elicit a myth or ideal of man versus nature, but beings who are internally striving and suffering, whose surface does not reveal all about their character (John’s cowboy image giving away to the voice of a frightened child), and who fully inhabit the experience we spectators are only observe from a comfortable distance.

This might serve to remind us as spectators that the cinematic image – even in its seemingly least affected mode – literally flattens out whatever slice of life it purports to reproduce for us, sacrificing the dimensionality of living experience in favour of the production of iconic images that either affirm or recapitulate pre-existing, perhaps pre-cinematic, ideas about the workings of the world. It was these moments in Sweetgrass, when such questions regarding the filmable and the unfilmable were dragged crying and screaming to the film’s surface, that constituted for me the key revelatory experiences to be taken from the film.

- Alifeleti Brown

My Dog Tulip

Dir. Paul Fierlinger & Sandra Fierlinger

The festival guide informs potential viewers that Paul and Sandra Fierlinger’s animated feature film My Dog Tulip is a film to be taken seriously; that it is an ‘animation for adults.’ If the short film is the middle child of cinema—always forgotten, mistreated and unacknowledged for its effort—I think animated feature films must be the youngest child. Whilst they may get some attention, animated features are constantly patronised, rarely taken seriously and frequently forced to associate with annoying children. Unfortunately MIFF’s initial assertion that My Dog Tulip is designed to appeal to adult sensibilities simply perpetuates this belief.

My Dog Tulip is a charming film that appeals to both intellect and instinct. The premise: a middle-aged Englishman unexpectedly finding himself enamoured with an Alsatian. The aristocratic J.R Ackerley, who had been searching his entire life for the ideal friend, rescues the canine from a working class slum and immediately emphasises a class division that spans almost the entirety of the film. The slum is never mentioned again but is represented through the mongrel dogs that incessantly attempt to mate with Tulip whilst she is on heat. In the final act of the film, however, Ackerley allows Tulip to mate with a mongrel after his attempt to ‘marry’ her with a number of purebred dogs goes awry. Yes, this film does engage with the clichéd storyline of the beast that ultimately changes the views of the man. But this is done in a way that minimizes cringe and maximises laughter and enjoyment—perhaps it has something to do with the animation.

The animated imagery of this film has a hand drawn feel to it making the individual images almost graspable. It reminds me of the sketches of old men which I guess connects the images to the voice of the narrator, the heart of this film. At the most humorous of times in this film, the imagery mirrors a lined piece of paper and the action consists of mere stick drawings of anthropomorphised dogs and people going about their daily routines. At times the colour palate is almost vividly dull, clearly echoing the life of the protagonist prior to ownership of the dog. Once these kindred spirits are together the colours brighten and movement within the frame becomes more dynamic.

There is a hymn at the heart of this film. It is sung by a choir that mysteriously appear as Ackerley takes his dog to do her ‘business’ on the dirty banks of the River Thames. They harmoniously sing: ‘Human beings are prudes and bores. You smell my arse, I’ll smell yours.’ Perhaps it is true that ‘unable to love each other, the English turn naturally to dogs.’

- Whitney Monaghan