EIFF blog: Unique Voices, Distant Lives

Gorging on art-house cinema, as Edinburgh film-nuts are currently doing at the 66th Edinburgh International Film Festival, can sometimes feel like being on a diet of Mexican food. The ingredients may be spicy and nourishing but the presentation can often be a bit samey. Anyone who’s attended a festival will surely have experience the sensation of the programme beginning to fuse in your mind into one enormous cinematic whole. I’m happy to report, however, that after three days of screenings I’ve yet to sense any feeling of festival déjà vu thanks to this year’s eclectic collection. Perhaps its the broad range of nations represented at this year’s event, but among the themes emerging from the festival so far, a plentitude of singular cinematic voices is one of the most welcome.

Take Killer Joe, Edinburgh's blistering opening gala. Recent films exploring the lives of working class America have tended towards a realist hick aesthetic that’s become overly familiar (see festival favourites Winter’s Bone, Frozen River, Ballast, Wendy and Lucy). Killer Joe, with its broadly drawn trailer trash brood and outré southern fried atmosphere (lightning, gravestone crosses, a gates of hell mutt), eschews any pretense of realism. But then, I suppose, you don’t go to William Friedkin for subtle authenticity. This is a man who imagined puberty as an unholy possession with 180 degree head spins, pea soup projectile vomiting and mutilation/masturbation using Jesus on the cross.

In Killer Joe, the major talking point is another simulated sex act: a stomach churning sledgehammer of a scene involving a piece of Colonel Sanders’ finest. As a metaphor for how greed degrades us, it’s finger lickin' good. But as a scene to sit through, it leaves a bad taste in your mouth. What helps make Killer Joe palatable, however, is its coal black humour. Tracy Letts’ script (based on his 1993 play) trembles between tragedy and farce, and the cast (Matthew McConaughey, Emile Hirsch, Juno Temple, Thomas Hayden Church and Gina Gershon) have their deadpan southern drawl deliveries down pat. Friedkin also throws in a few choice visual gags, the best being the scene where the eponymous hit-man-for-hire burns the body of his latest victim while a sign that reads ‘Billy’s BBQ’ blazes in the background in red neon.

It was certainly a bold festival gambit and, as the always pin sharp Emily Munro (@ellomunro) noted on twitter, whatever your feelings about the film itself you have to respect EIFF director Chris Fujiwara for selecting an opener that gets sponsors talking about sexual politics at the opening party.

Low on controversy but not short of unique points-of-view have been the competition films I’ve seen so far. Girimunho, from Brazil, was very distinct. It’s a dreamy look at a rural community, and specifically a hard-as-nails octogenarian widow who’s struggling on valiantly with a spring in her step even though her body is failing her. The film style that it seems closest to is documentary (the actors are locals playing thinly veiled versions of themselves) but directors Campolina and Marins throw in moments of magic realism and poetic invention that set it apart from the realist films of the west.

Tabu, an extraordinary looking feature from Portuguese director Miguel Gomes, also seems to be a meditation on ageing as it focuses in, after a mysterious colonial Africa opening, on a trio of elderly women living in a modern apartment complex. Shot in crisp black and white, it follows these golden girls as they bicker about what to do with the most frail of their group, a Ray Band and fur coat-wearing glamourpuss who looks like she just stepped off the set of a Hollywood noir. The film feels wonderfully enigmatic and the performances are characterised by intentionally over-deliberate line readings. But director Gomes has a trick up his sleeve: a switcheroo which throws us back to the silent movie colonial world of the opening. To say more would ruin the surprise but it creates a hugely satisfying diptych.

A similarly unique perspective is at play in Life Just Is, the debut feature from writer/director Alex Barrett, which is competing for the Michael Powell award. The film centres on five friends, all of whom are recent graduates festering in a post-university funk. These shapeless lives and hazy relationships are brought into sharp focus by Barrett’s precise, clear-eyed and unpredictable direction. Thinking back on the film, I can’t recall a single shot/reverse-shot scene, despite all the intimate one-to-one pow-wows. Using a patient, stationary camera, a sense of unease is created by Barrett’s confident rejection of conventional film grammer, with frontal close-ups and tightly packed wide-shots being the preferred tools for framing his characters' awkward conversations.

Life Just Is’ London-set milieu is a very specific and recognisable one but Barrett's tale of existential ennui and interpersonal crises is a kind rarely tackled in British cinema. It’s like Éric Rohmer or Ingmar Bergman has trespassed on to Mike Leigh’s patch.

Bennett’s film isn’t perfect, some of his performer seem less in tune with his script’s staccato rhythms than others, but it’s exciting to see a British filmmaker emerge off the blocks with a style all his own.

You’d be hard pressed not to recognise the authorial stamp of Shinji Somai in the pre-credits scene of his 1983 film PP Rider, which kicked off the Japanese director’s career retrospective. In one breathtakingly long bravado opening crane shot we’re introduced to three high school friends (Jojo, Gisho, and tomboy Bruce) and Fatty, the school bully who makes their lives a misery. What follows is a riotous chase movie where the teen trio attempt to track down Fatty after he’s mistakingly kidnapped by yakuzza drug dealers.

The screening was introduced by Chris Fujiwara and Nuclear Nation director Atsushi Funahashi, who made some interesting observations on his countryman’s recurring motifs. Funahashi described Somai as a director who always seems to be in a "battle against gravity". It's not hard to see what he means: PP Rider’s effervescent protagonist are fierce and fearless, constantly moving vertically up and down the frame, scaling walls and leaping from bridges. Rarely will you find them on the same z plane. Funahashi also noted that Somai’s characters like to get wet. It’s like they’ll burn up if they don’t plunge themselves into the drink in every reel – Typhoon Club, The Catch and Moving also see their protagonists quick to immerse themselves in H2O. There are twelve other Somai films screening over the next ten days and I urge you to take the plunge also.