The A-Z Of The 2015 Melbourne International Film Festival: Part Two

previously: part 1

DEMOCRATS

Director: Camilla Nielsson (Denmark/Zimbabwe)

Premise: Rival politicians are charged with penning the constitution for the new ‘democratic’ Zimbabwe.

Film Carewzin': The fallout of a disputed election and the tentative forging of a new democracy sound like mythical events, but Nielsson’s documentary uses its amazing on-the-ground access to show policy-making at its most mundane, petty, and personal.

Go Watch It If: Governmental procedures and rival politicking are your kind of comedy/drama.

DOPE

Director: Rick Famuyiwa (USA)

Premise: A trio of blipster nerds —who like ‘white shit’ like Donald Glover and TV On The Radio— end up with a backpack full of drugs, and rival dealers out to retrieve it.

Film Carewzin': Famuyiwa’s hyped coming-of-age flick is so obsessed with the ’90s it doesn’t just dress its characters in daisy-age threads and blast old-school jams, but dials up ghetto-movie tropes as homage to Boyz N The Hood, Juice, Fresh et al; a generation-ago’s tragedy now playing as semi-satirical comedy.

Go Watch It If: You’re ready to do The Humpty Dance.

DRUNK, STONED, BRILLIANT, DEAD: THE STORY OF THE NATIONAL LAMPOON

Director: Douglas Tirola (USA)

Premise: Refer to title (above).

Film Carewzin': If you’re going to parade a collection of talking-heads waxing nostalgic about their past exploits, at least make sure they’re funny. So it goes with this look at the American comic institution, from its student magazine beginnings to its evolution into fleeting Hollywood power-players.

Go Watch It If: You want to get Holiday Road stuck in your head.

THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY

Director: Peter Strickland (UK)

Premise: In an alternate realm of no men and abundant butterflies, Babett Knudsen and Chiara D’Anna undertake endless games of role-playing and light S&M.

Film Carewzin': Following the great Katalín Varga and Berberian Sound Studio, Strickland ups the artful ante, summoning ’70s ‘erotic cinema’ in gloriously-stylised, absurdist comedy that makes drollery of the banality of domesticated fetishry.

Go Watch It If: I could interest you in a human toilet.

EARLY WINTER

Director: Michael Rowe (Canada)

Premise: An analogue-loving retirement-home worker suspects his digitally-distracted wife is having an affair.

Film Carewzin': After two films in Mexico, Australian expat Rowe alights in Québec with Xavier Dolan muse Suzanne Clément. But there’s nothing Dolan-esque about his slow-burning drama, a grim portrait of a marriage in decline that continues his directorial fascination with family-units and unerotic fucking.

Go Watch It If: You know marriage isn’t hell, but something far more cold.

THE ECSTASY OF WILKO JOHNSON

Director: Julien Temple (UK)

Premise: When Dr. Feelgood guitarist Wilko Johnson is diagnosed with terminal cancel and given 10 months to live, he feels a sense of ‘elation’, embracing the time he has left and the arrival of the end.

Film Carewzin': Temple’s documentary is a long monologue from its effusive subject, which he dresses in all manner of borrowed illustrative imagery; clipped from Buñuel and Parajanov, with Murnau’s Nosferatu and Bergman’s The Seventh Seal providing familiar visions of death. It works because Johnson, himself, is a constant source of quotations, riffing on Milton, Blake, and Shakespeare to communicate eternal wisdoms on human existence.

Go Watch It If: When it comes to the “cosmic joke” of sentience, you’ve got your own wry sense-of-tumour.

ECCO HOMO

Director: Lynn-Maree Milburn & Richard Lowenstein (Australia)

Premise: The life and times of chameleonic ’80s scenester Peter/Vanessa/Troy Davies.

Film Carewzin': The latest documentary portrait from Milburn and Lowenstein —of a Dogs In Space cast-member, no less— grapples with the essential dilemma of making a film about someone whose own life was an ever-shifting game of identities, theatricalities, deceits, and manipulative confessions.

Go Watch It If: All the world’s your stage.

EL CINCO

Director: Adrian Biniez (Argentina)

Premise: A smalltown, second-tier soccer enforcer ponders what to do with his life when he hangs up his boots.

Film Carewzin': Biniez’s charming, unexpectedly-aloof comedy constantly evades expectations, its ambling, episodic structure side-stepping the dramatic and comic conventions written into its premise. Rather than being a study in the sporting lug dealing with retirement’s blow to his ego, it becomes a sweet, loving portrait of a supportive relationship.

Go Watch It If: It’s stoppage-time in your sporting life.

ENTER THE VOID

Director: Gaspar Noé (France)

Premise: 154-minute video-clip in which the melodramatic, metaphysical, and psychedelic are seen through one character’s POV.

Film Carewzin': If you’re a stoned teenager, this might be the greatest cinematic experience of your life. If you’re not, you’re in for a long, strange, silly trip.

Go Watch It If: The fact John Waters called this “the best film ever about taking hallucinogenic drugs” makes it can’t-miss.

EXOTICA, EROTICA, ETC.

Director: Evangelia Kranioti (France/Greece)

Premise: A drifting, dreamy, poetic meditation on the prostitutes who come aboard on long-haul container ships.

Film Carewzin': Kranioti’s remarkable debut is an achingly-beautiful cine-poem alive to the wonder of pure image.

Go Watch It If: Leviathan’s high-seas visions still haunt.

FASSBINDER – TO LOVE WITHOUT DEMANDS

Director: Christian Braad Thomsen (Denmark)

Premise: A portrait of the late German filmmaker built around an unseen archival interview and footage from his endless films.

Film Carewzin': This is less nostalgic paean to Neuer Deutscher Film, more a chance to see the moustachioed creep himself gabbin’ in all his sweaty, garrulous, ’70s glory.

Go Watch It If: Fassbinder fans only.

FINDERS KEEPERS

Director: Bryan Carberry & Clay Tweel (USA)

Premise: Two Carolina bumpkins fight over possession —and the rightful ‘ownership’— of an amputated, mummified leg.

Film Carewzin': This crowd-pleasing documentary starts off going behind a stranger-than-fiction story, and pushing back against the predatory nature of news coverage. But Carberry and Tell dig ever deeper, the doc becoming a portrait of paternal legacy, Southern masculinity, family trauma, and eventual healing.

Go Watch It If: You wanna laugh ’til you cry and cry ’til you laugh.

FLAPPING IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE

Director: Diep Hoang Nguyen (Vietnam)

Premise: Will a Hanoi teen get enough money together for an abortion, or decide to keep her baby?

Film Carewzin': Diep’s debut film moves between unvarnished vérité and flights of fantasy, between grim urban squalor and hi-so finery, between cockfighting pits and hospital waiting-rooms, showing great sense of cinematic as it goes.

Go Watch It If: “The most amazing pregnancy-anxiety-dream-sequence in cinema history” is an enticing phrase.

FOR GRACE

Director: Kevin Pang & Mark Helenowski (USA)

Premise: Chicago chef Curtis Duffy preps for the opening of his ambitious new restaurant.

Film Carewzin': This documentary is filled with all the familiar tics of foodie filmmaking —the kitchen research montages and reverential shots of immaculate platings— but For Grace also harbours a slow-reveal secret: the tragedy that litters Duffy’s history.

Go Watch It If: You know that chairs are fucking expensive, man. They are really pricey.

THE FORBIDDEN ROOM

Director: Guy Maddin (Canada)

Premise: The notion of nesting narratives is pushed past the point of demented absurdity.

Film Carewzin': If it’s not Maddin’s best film, then it’s certainly his most Maddinesque. Riffing on silent expressionism and archaic melodramas, the Canadian kook careens ever-further into wild and wacky stories-within-stories, until all your familiar narrative bearings are lost.

Go Watch It If: You’ve ever wanted to see a film partially narrated by moustache hairs.

GAYBY BABY

Director: Maya Newell (Australia)

Premise: A documentary portrait of four Sydney pre-adolescents coming-of-age under the watching eye of same-sex parents.

Film Carewzin': Newell nobly gives a face and a voice to the kids always brought up in marriage equality debates, but her film hits no unexpected narrative notes; telling simplified family stories that feel more human-interest television than real cinema.

Go Watch It If: Won’t somebody please think of the children?