TAKE ONE 35th Cambridge Film Festival Issue 2

THE 35th CAMBRIDGE FILM FESTIVAL

R E V I E W previewed FUsion: Love and Death

INSIDE:

Lech Majewski season SHort films from GERMANY

The Fire

The Long Way Home Poached

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Movies on the Meadows (photo by Dave Riley)

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The Fire Go on. Admit it. You love hearing couples spatting in public. THE FIRE (EL INCENDIO) buzzes with that vibe. But unlike, say, eavesdropping on a grievance detonating loudly in a museum gallery, this isn’t funny. Mesmerising, maybe. But definitely not funny.

The frizz of a relationship gets well and truly doused and we’re all playing gooseberry.

Plenty of other break-up films, like BLUE VALENTINE or WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?, serve the pain. What Argentine director Juan Schnitman nails here is personal space. Lots of scenes pose thirtysomething couple Lucia and Marcelo around the one place where privacy is laid to siege: the bathroom. At first, it’s mostly smiles as Lucia and Marcelo awake and hastily ablute in tandem. They are about to buy a new flat, and various items have already been packed. Marcelo remains unshaven. Later, he uses the bathroom as a refuge only for Lucia to trespass upon his shower. Nude, she forces a hug out of him. He averts his gaze before fleeing.

She slinks into her own shower. The shower gel might as well be laced with creosote.

At work Marcelo, a teacher, faces the consequences for dragging a teen from the class by his neck. In isolation it might not be so bad but a violent edge to Lucia and Marcelo’s relationship emerges. At first, it’s play-fighting for that moment too long – leading to a somewhat forced clinch. Later, angry sex at a party has a sadomasochistic edge. The dilemma here is whether this behaviour is normal for them, whether it is plain abusive or, worst of all, both. Consent is definitely there for both bouts of the rough stuff, but is this causing the strife? Marcelo’s later behaviour suggests the latter. Schnitman deliberately keeps this vague, though arguably giving the film more of a villain than it deserves.

After waking, Lucia and Marcelo head to a bank vault with bundles of dollar bills under their clothes. As they return home, defeated from buying a new house, they divest themselves of their money pouches. She yanks her pouch off downwards, like a pair of knickers. He tears open his trousers at the fly. The director plays the strip as a parody of intimacy. With everything else failing, money binds them still.

THE FIRE screens on 4 September at 15.00 at APH.

THE LONG WAY HOME THE LONG WAY HOME (EL CAMÍ MÉS LLARG PER TORNAR A CASA) does its best to kill off Elvis, the ailing mutt at the film’s centre. It digs graves with twigs, stones and fingernails, and the techno from the car stereo almost drowns the muffled squeals from the rear boot. Elvis and his beleaguered owner, Joel (Borja Espinosa), ain’t no Turner and Hooch, that’s for sure. So how does the story remain so doggedly empathetic?

Sergi Perez’s film has something of a Rottweiler’s heart. It’s gruff and it snarls.

Frequently it delves into scrapes to which you wish you weren’t led. It veers between snarling, gnashing and whimpering, and, in its most testing moments, lurches savagely close to feral violence as Joel almost brutalizes one of his partner’s former colleagues.

Yet as with all dangerous dogs, there’s a history of suffering below the bared teeth – and it’s the scars, physical and emotional, that drive Joel to his snarling pugnacity.

Joel’s pain is a fresh wound. Beneath his exasperation and frenzy a larger, longer crisis begins to surface. Conversations allude to a girlfriend ‘not here’, as Joel asks, ‘Where did she used to leave her car?’ It is not until his inability to call his or her family that we begin to suspect her fate was a tragic one. Locked out of the flat they shared and desperate to find a spare key, Joel is forced back into the memories of a lost life.

For most of the film our protagonist is masked. As he wakes alone in his bed, Joel’s face is severed by shadow. As he sits in his deceased partner’s office, the gloom leaves his figure almost entirely obscured. The camera takes to glancing Joel through doorways or in wing mirrors. In one scene, a journey across the city is almost entirely shown from the back of Joel’s head.

As you’re pushed away and away, you have to wonder – Who is Joel? Do we even know this character? His identity is lost in his grief and must be retrieved. Elvis, a pet clinging to life yet sliding to death, is the last, and maybe most painful memory of all that’s been lost. Joel may want to let the dog go or leave him in the woods, but it’s Joel that will end up truly abandoned.

THE LONG WAY HOME screens on 3 September at 15.30 and 10 September at 18.00 at APH.

Lech Majewski Lech Majewski’s continuing run of visually and intellectually stimulating cinematic works dates from the THE ROE’S ROOM (POKOJ SAREN) in 1997. This represented a clear change in direction from his previous films.

In fact, THE ROE’S ROOM was created less as a film in the usual sense than as a visualisation, made for Polish television, of Majewski’s own poetic and autobiographical opera. He chose to treat the metaphors of his libretto literally, so that we see a tree growing through his parents’ ordinary flat and roe deer wandering around eating the grass growing on the floor (hence the title). As that description suggests, this is a hugely imaginative but also undeniably perplexing work, as much elusive as allusive.

Since then most of Majewski’s works have followed this template to some extent, and might more properly be thought of as artifacts than as conventional narrative films.

Majewski is an unashamed highbrow: the loose trilogy of THE GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS (2004), THE MILL AND THE CROSS (2011) and ONIRICA (2014) are inspired by Bosch, Bruegel and Dante respectively, while his unembarrassed approach to the eternal verities would probably bring the average Brit out in hives.

Majewski is known for his visionary eye, conjuring compelling pictures from his imagination, but he also has a more practical ability to find the beauty in existing structures.

As befits an artist who co-composes the music for his films, he is unusually concerned with sound design. These, along with a structural rigour, are part of what gives his work its richness. On the other hand, dialogue sometimes appears to be a necessary evil, and Majewski has been known to have his characters deliver undigested treatises on philosophy, history, art theory and theo­logy.

Given Majewski’s more exalted concerns, humour is rarely a major component of these films. However, one refreshing exception to this is his 1999 film WOJACZEK (right), a bleakly funny and anarchic record of a few months in the life of the young, brilliant but repeatedly suicidal poet Rafal Wojaczek in the early 1970s, during the dog days of Poland’s communist regime.

The Lech Majewski retrospective runs between 7 and 11 September at APH.

Poached We are in the strange world of obsessives, and the driving, nerve-jangling compulsion here is that of birds’ eggs – but not just any old fowl or avian species. The collectors in Timothy Wheeler’s POACHED stalk and steal the eggs of rare species.

POACHED could easily have been about people who fetishise the accumulation of stamps, old currency notes, vintage cars, tin cans or shoes. So why did Wheeler choose to focus on egg collecting? ‘Most people couldn’t care less about wild birds’ eggs,’ says Wheeler. ‘Yet some people are willing to die and go to prison for them.’

If images of nests being emptied of their would-be chicks upsets, then this may not be the film choice for you. That said, Wheeler certainly knows how to put the ‘ooh ahs’ into ‘oology’ (the practice of egg collection). Aerial shots of soaring birds of prey, and coastal panoramas are interspersed with bizarre moments, including clandestine footage of ‘Britain’s most successful egg collector’ (his own description) who, with his deliberately distorted voice and bird-head disguise makes for a most scary bogeyman. Wheeler achieves a delicate balance between gritty sociodrama and beautiful nature film – David Attenborough meets Ken Loach.

POACHED features a series of out-takes as well as the recreation of a ‘Super 8 home movie’ sequence. ‘With one of the film subjects , we deliberately break what in theatre and cinema terms is called the fourth wall,’ explains Wheeler. ‘From the very first time filming, he addressed the film’s future audience as if he were making the documentary for his own purposes. Breaking the fourth wall added to his character, his story, the humour, and told more about his truth. Using several takes was just one method of highlighting his self-awareness.’

Getting under the skin of the men (and they are all men) who steal rare birds’ eggs may not be a comfortable experience, but Wheeler’s gaze is necessarily unflinching. Their motivations come through and it seems it isn’t about money. Like all obsessives, there is damage here, and some of the revelations are painful to watch – this of course is about people, their broken relationships, but also about redemption.

POACHED screens on 7 September at 21.00 at APH and 8 September at 18.45 at The Light Cinema.

Love And Death These short films in the Fusion: Love and Death series are wonderful as standalone pieces, but together they relate to one another, giving a joyful experience that audiences don’t often have the opportunity to enjoy.

If there’s a film better than writer/director Phil Sheerin’s film NORTH at the Cambridge Film Festival then I can’t wait to see it. This short was almost unwatchable: not for bad reasons, but because it was so bloody heart-breaking. Sheerin’s simple story, set in Ireland, leaves you thinking big, contemplating everyone you love and what you would do when that time comes. An amazing film from a real talent.

Under three minutes long, Rob Savage’s ABSENCE has a better twist than most two hour Hollywood films. Beginning with a man (Paul McGann) waking up and caressing the empty side of the bed, the plot swivels within a frightening image. By the end you’ll consider a pants transplant. Fantastic writing, plus Ollie Downey’s cinematography is as sneaky as the script.

Hadas Ayalon’s short film PARIS ON THE WATER shows love and death relating to one another: we have the forty-five year happy marriage of Israeli actress Baytha and her husband Michel next to the lurking gloom of death. Ayalon’s script doesn’t play for cheap schmaltzy shots, instead she wins out by showing the characters’ dignity.

Olive and Al are about to say ‘I love you’ for the first time in Daisy Aitkens’s delightful 96 WAYS TO SAY I LOVE YOU, which has a great twist-in-the-tale.

If you’re thinking about starting a family you might want to give Stefan Georgiou’s SEXLIFE a miss, but you’ll be passing on an outstanding short film.

Kefi Chadwick’s uplifting script uncovers what we do for people we really love in order to make them happy.

Glenn Paton’s H POSITIVE is dominated by an affluent, powerful man (Roger Barclay), as he sits in his luxury property. With a slight twitch of the eye or a clenched jaw monologue, Barclay skilfully displays his character’s disgust at being sick and dying; something, you feel, he never imagined happening to him. The gamut of emotions which run across the protagonist’s sallow face makes this strangely addictive; the viewer is desperate to know more.

Isabel Garrett’s BYE BYE DANDELION is a sweet animated short film about a creature finding, following and saying goodbye to the head of a dandelion as it floats through the countryside.

FUSION: LOVE & DEATH screens on 4 September at 17.30 at APH.

German shorts This multifarious collection of four short films celebrate the variety and talent in German cinema today. These artfully crafted and mature films evoke a spectrum of responses, from humour to dark humour to just plain dark, and are united in their appeals to the rawest elements of human experience: estrangement, desperation and our ultimate need for hope.

Linda Lutz and Wunna Winter imagined, hand-crafted, shot and edited LURE. This brief stop-motion animation wastes no time in introducing a plump, chirpy boy and a wheelchair-using elderly lady who are united only in their mutual loneliness and interest in a yapping orange dog.

The intentionally choppy cuts, absence of dialogue and increasingly shifty characters escort the viewers somewhere quite unexpected, but well worth visiting. A similarly intriguing film is Damien Schipporeit’s THE OLD MAN AND THE CAT about a lonely octogenarian who celebrates his birthday with fantasised figures of affection: a cat and a beautiful young neighbour. An effortlessly touching film about life, loss and loneliness, it is curiously optimistic.

Michael Binz’s quirky HERMAN THE GERMAN dramatically tells the story of Schnitzeltorte-loving Herman Heimlich, who embarks on a mission to cure himself of the rare Kahnawake syndrome (the inability to experience fear). Packed with explosions (of sausages) and impossible tasks (choosing between Schnitzel sauces), HERMAN THE GERMAN takes strides in stamping out the stereotypes

of both the humourless German and lugubrious German cinema.

Most memorable in the set is Patrick Vollrath’s half-hour thriller ALLES WIRD GUT (EVERYTHING WILL BE OKAY), which is gripping from beginning to end and haunting even long after its gut-wrenching climax. The story begins by depicting a seemingly humdrum day out shared by a divorced father and his eight-year-old daughter before warping in unimaginable directions. The mantra ‘everything will be okay’ is repeated throughout the film, with an increasingly apparent emptiness of meaning. When everything is not okay, we can expect only brutally honest sentiments.

GERMAN SHORTS screen on 6 September at 15.00 at Emmanuel and on 8 September at 13.30 at APH.