Film Carew: We Are The Best!, Jodorowosky's Dune, The Infinite Man & More

13 September 2014 | 12:11 pm | Anthony Carew

Wait, did Film Carew just witness the most influential movie never made?

WE ARE THE BEST!

We Are The Best! is a blast: a tale of three adolescent Swedish girls forming a punk-band in the face of an indifferent early-’80s Stockholm. But the premise is barely the point: by the end of its 100 minutes, they can still barely play; this not a film bothered with depicting musical greatness.

Director Lukas Moodysson, instead, is most concerned with how it feels to be 13 years old, dealing with the horrors of high-school and hormones. He gives his screen debutantes — firebrand Mira Barkhammar, scowling Mira Grosin, bashful Liv LeMoyne — the unscripted space and long takes to be themselves, their natural boisterousness, nervousness, and joy coming out as they flail at their instruments, find their screen presence, and summon their own adolescent emotions. The story’s based on the coming-of-age experiences of Moodysson’s wife, graphic novelist Coco, and that adds to its warmth, its truth. There’s a ‘feelgood’ feeling that harkens back to the filmmaker’s beloved early days, and films like 1998’s Fucking Åmål and 2000’s Together. Taken together, these three films essentially work as a triptych. Each explores what ‘teenage rebellion’ means for the children of liberal, accepting Swedish parents; at how a society big on freedom and tolerance can still feel stifling to its youthful contrarians.

Few films have captured how it feels to be young and recalcitrant quite so beautifully.

JODOROWSKY'S DUNE

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Jodorowosky’s Dune documents one of cinema’s great ‘What if’ myths: Alejandro Jodorowsky’s long-gossiped-about mid-’70s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi saga. The project spent years in production, before, on the eve of shooting, it was permanently shelved due to financial shortfall.

The myth survives because it’s indivisible from the myth of Jodorowsky, the acid-trippin’ auteur of bugfuck-bonkers psychedelic classics El Topo (1970) and The Holy Mountain (1973), who vanished for over two decades following 1990’s The Rainbow Thief. It’s a myth that Jodorowsky’s Dune not only wants to protect, but play up; not just because it’s #1 talkin-head is Jodo himself, but because it’s director Frank Pavich’s point. This is a movie about myth-making, both on-screen and off; a portrait of the filmmaker-as-soothsayer, a cult-leader attracting followers by selling them on the mystical visions of a promised tomorrow. The tone is effectively tragicomic: Jodorowsky ever-hilarious as he recounts the ridiculousness of his ambition, of the way he wanted to populate the picture with performances from Salvador Dali and Mick Jagger; the tragedy being that he never got to. “What if Dune was the first sci-fi blockbuster, not Star Wars?” a talking-head wonders, herein, and the ‘What if’ takes a sad turn; we not only losing a cult-film, but a potential moral benchmark.

Pavich mitigates that tragedy by finding its influence anyway, seeing echoes of its production work turning up in Star Wars, Alien, and Raiders Of The Lost Ark, among others. Which makes Jodorowsky’s Dune, in all its myths, the most influential movie never made.

THE INFINITE MAN

If all of mankind’s greatest inventions were a way of impressing the opposite sex, wouldn’t time-travel be the same? In Hugh Sullivan’s first feature, the filmmaker gives us a neurotic, neuroscientist nerd (Josh McConville) obsessed with achieving ‘perfection’ on a romantic weekend-away with his girlfriend (Hannah Marshall).

What he’s really attempting to live up to is the nostalgia of memory, against which reality always falls short. When it invariably does, early in The Infinite Man’s opening act, our flawed ‘hero’ responds by inventing a time-travel device. As plot device, this leads to a film that feels like Primer reimagined as rom-com, with an ever-multiplying array of parallel selves piling up; its infinite possibilities not the stuff of sheer chin-scratchery (unlike, say, another recent Australia time-travel film, Predestination), but endless projections of male insecurity. Sullivan knows that his chosen premise persists in popular-culture because people are prisoners of time, trapped within temporality. The desire to rewrite the past or change the future is indivisibly wed to regret, and regrets are at their most poignant when it comes to romantic entanglements.

Whilst all its dizzying paradoxes and if-then-else ripple-effects are neat narrative tricks, what makes The Infinite Man work so well is the way it succeeds as romantic comedy: Sullivan summoning both tender emotions and oddball humour; minting one of the most memorable local debuts in recent memory.

I ORIGINS

At its best, I Origins is a profoundly beautiful portrait of nascent love as a collision that confounds the rational-brain; and, more darkly, of how people can turn anything — stalking, science, grief, culpability — into erotic foreplay. At its worst, well, it borders on Transcendence-esque: a silly sci-fi conceit filled with smart-sounding buzzwords, in which man’s grandest philosophical quandaries — science, God, nature, nurture, immortality, morality — are turned into a shitty genre movie.

It’s from Mike Cahill and Brit Marling, the pair who made the alternate-world Sundance-drama Another Earth, with Marling and Michael Pitt playing a pair of atheist scientists who think making blind worms see will disprove God exists, or something (“this will be the greatest scientific discovery the world has ever seen!” Marling marvels, the line seemingly cut-and-pasted from a hundred films that’ve come before). Pitt is obsessed with taking photos of eyes and digitising these ‘windows unto the soul’ online, and is delighted when he gets to access a databank of everyone who’s ever been retinally-scanned; the digital-dystopia’s true omniscient deity being the surveillance state.

Since there’s never been a cinema scientist who hasn’t gotten their comeuppance for playing-God, you know there’ll be blowback for the Pitt and Marling’s every breakthrough. And the heavy-handed and narratively-convenient way that Cahill delivers mystical doses of chance and coincidence, tragedy and revelation, is just another reminder that, in cinema, the only one truly playing God is the auteur.

Night Moves

Meek’s Cutoff was seen, in some circles, as Kelly Reichardt’s attempt at genre; the reigning queen of American cinematic minimalism making a revisionist Western in which a troupe of Oregon trailblazers walked their covered-wagons into the wilderness. It may’ve had Michelle Williams in a bonnet, but it certainly wasn’t a genre-movie; something reassured by the arrival of Night Moves, Reichardt’s first film to ever be truly concerned with convention.

It introduces us to Jesse Eisenberg, Dakota Fanning, and Peter Sarsgaard, a trio of eco-terrorists enacting a plan to blow up a local dam. They’re neither heroes nor villains, just colleagues with a job to do; this imminent explosion — in which no one is hoped to be harmed — a symbolic act in a world in which bees, fish, and humanity are all hurtling towards extinction. Once the deed is done, they go their separate ways, only for guilt, remorse, distrust, and suspicion to slowly consume them. Reichardt’s fondness for long takes and sustained silence proves itself an intriguing fit for this kind of thriller; the paranoia slowly seeping into frame as Eisenberg tries to return to his noble labour as transient organic-farm worker, only to grow spooked by every rustle of the breeze in the trees.

The mechanisms of genre inevitably take the story to familiar places, but Night Moves retains a hushed, haunted, unhurried air that’s all its own.

THE IMMIGRANT

It’s January 1921, and Marion Cotillard is queuing at Ellis Island, another immigrant seeking entry into New York City. Her movie-star face shines out from the tired, poor, huddled masses, because James Gray — one of quasi-mainstream American cinemas few genuine auteurs — shoots her, even when at her grimmest, like a matinée idol. Cotillard’s beauty catches the eye of Joaquin Phoenix, a hawk circling those fresh-off-the-boat, unaccompanied woman of “low morals” so much ripe flesh. He’s a self-romanticising ‘guardian’, a prohibition-era burlesque-troupe manager cum pimp, who offers home and wage to those who’d otherwise be lost to the tenement slums.

Gray shoots his reimagined, 100-year-old vision through sepia the tint of effluence; both summoning old-Hollywood glamour and presenting the past as bleak, dank, diseased. Its tragic tale of a woman trampled by men feels as old as biblical parable; Cotillard remaining unbowed as she suffers the slings and arrows of the new world, her virtue sullied, her flesh peddled. It’s reminiscent of Lars von Trier’s old works, where a simple, true Christian woman becomes martyr, the horrors and hypocrisies of humanity hurled at her. Switching between English and Polish — neither her native tongue — Cotillard brings both grace and cheekbones to her doomed turn; and Phoenix, as ever, is an actor of profound physical control (that forehead, yes).

When Jeremy Renner enters the frame as a romantic rival, The Immigrant turns darker, more desperate; the arrival of an antagonist making the imminence of tragedy inescapable.