Film Carew

For 13 years Whit Stillman wasn't literally on screens, but figuratively he still was: the filmmaker's white-and-witty, whimsical ways still flickering through his influence, both on the small (Gilmore Girls, Girls) and the large (the works of Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach). Damsels In Distress marks his first feature since 1998's The Last Days Of Disco, but it isn't exactly a heroic comeback; this isn't Terrence Malick arising out of the wilderness, but the foremost chronicler of the urban haute-bourgeoisie strolling back with another frothy film about the ridiculous, philosophical, debate-starting children of privilege. It's a college comedy, this time set on campus; and, where Metropolitan looked at the collegiate experience at a remove —its study of class-status and privilege between terms, with identity found away from the strictures of timetables and dormitories— here it's all about the place, even if it is not so much about studies. The film chronicles a group of girls-with-floral-names —lead by Greta Gerwig, the mumble-core pin-up all too natural a fit for Stillman's low-key comic sensibility and super-fast delivery— who take it upon themselves to 'brighten up' campus. There's delusion in their dreams, and ridiculousness to their self-importance; their anti-depression/suicide guild a parody of upper-class philanthropy, in which those in need are 'helped' only on the narrow, self-serving terms of the supposedly benevolent. Such satire is laced into what's far-and-away Stillman's most crowd-pleasing picture: a pastel-coloured, romantically-hued, softly-lensed collegiate fantasia about pretty —and deluded, self-destructive, narcissistic, contradictory, calculating, and endlessly proper— bring colour and sparkle to an otherwise-dour New England campus.

Your Sister's Sister starts with a spark: with Mark Duplass, playing the 'lost' turn-of-his-30s lead, refusing to buy into the warm-and-fuzzy memorial for his brother; righteously —if a little drunk and obnoxiously— refuting the maudlin canonisation of the lost via selective memories; he seeing this revisionist history as fraudulent, a sign of disrespect for the dead. It's a 'low' moment for the character, a public scene that represents a bottoming-out, but writer/director Lynn Shelton clearly sees his rebellion as worthy, symbolic act; and, in turn, the screenplay —fashioned by the filmmaker in collaboration with actors Duplass, Emily Blunt, and Rosemary DeWitt (the latter playing sisters)— uses this model of 'uncomfortable truth' as its philosophical and emotional touchstone. Duplass retreats for to the family cabin of his best pal, Blunt, for a recuperative stint, but, soon, he ends up trapped in a triangle-of-sorts between the sisters. There's a sense of sitcom contrivance to the early set-up, but Your Sister's Sister backs away from easy jokes or even easier emotional notes; instead looking at the drama inherent in, say, maintaining a ruse. It's all going along swimmingly until the film takes a few incongruously-dramatic leaps of its own, and then it gets completely derailed at the start of the third act, when what initially seems to be a theatre-piece —three characters, one cabin, one weekend— sprawls into a passing-of-time montage that drags on forever.

Your Sister's Sister

Monsieur Lazhar is an excellent example of a usually-lamentable genre: the inspirational teacher movie. Here, an Algerian refugee in Montréal helps a classroom of pre-teen tykes overcome their grief in the wake of their teacher's suicide; this a sweetly-written fable devoted to the most noble notions of the teaching profession. Where this dire genre usually turns children into noxious narrative pawns —cut-out caricatures of lower-class meanness or darnedest-thing-saying cuteness— here they are given dignity by both the teacher in question, and by writer/director Philippe Falardeau. The French-Canadian filmmaker's prior picture, It's Not Me, I Swear! was a film about childhood that treated its rebellious, provocative, confused ten-year-old lead as a worthy protagonist, and Monsieur Lazhar, again, gives respect to the agency of children, to their opinions and perceptions. Narratively, this is presented in the school's formal approach to counseling; which is to speak of the suicide in abstract terms, and to think it best to not talk about directly; the psychologist believing on sheltering as a form of protection. Mohamed Fellag's titular character, himself harbouring a past of loss and trauma from his homeland, instead engages the children in dialogue; and uncovers as much complicity, anger, and hostility as simple sadness or pain. Falardeau handles all this with sensitivity and —considering the sub-genre and the drama at play— a great deal of restraint. The fact that the film was nominated for an Oscar suggests something maudlin and manipulative, but, unexpectedly, and gladly, it is neither.

Chinese Take-Away reminds me of a terrible —yet bafflingly crowd-pleasin'— movie from Israel called Noodle, where a Chinese orphan is treated less as human being, more as exotic pet. The set-up here's basically the same: Argentina's eternal leading-man Ricardo Darín playing a gruff loner who comes into possession of his very-own lost Chinese immigrant. Darín thinks he'll have to teach him the Argentine ways —eating bull's testicles!— but, woah, it's our foreign visitor that, like E.T., will teach us the lessons. It's a simple tale about, I suppose, 'understanding', that is, basically, pitched at xenophobes; do with that what you will.

Chinese Take-Away

Dreams Of A Life comes with an astonishing stranger-than-fiction story at its heart: in 2006, Joyce Vincent was found in her North London bedsit, dead. No one had noticed her gone. She had been there for three years. Symbolically, the TV had been on the whole time; and, to pile up even more symbols of modern life, her bedsit sat above a mall called Shopping City. She was in the middle of wrapping Christmas presents when she died. Dishes were piled in the sink. The body had spent so long decomposing that it was just a skeleton, so no autopsy could be performed, making her death a mystery. But for English filmmaker Carol Morley, Vincent's life was the greater mystery. Morley cared less about how her absence went unnoticed, more who she was before; before disappearing, before being forgotten, before slipping through the cracks of the modern surveillance-state —in London of all places— and dying completely and utterly alone. Morley's first feature, The Alcohol Years, found the filmmaker recruiting others to piece together her own past; seeking explanations for what really happened in a wasted youth spent in a daze in Factory-era Manchester (Morley, as the sister of famed NME scribe and Art Of Noise founder Paul Morley, was exposed to the halcyon days of English indie at an early age).

Dreams Of A Life

Here, she uses a similar format: finding old friends of Vincent's and getting them to tell their stories, to recount the times in which they knew her. It's not a journalistic approach in the slightest, but an interpretive one; these 'dreams' of Vincent's life being the filmmaker's own romantic imaginings and undoubted projections. If she took a more hard-line, investigative tack, Morley may've made something Errol Morris-ish: a stranger-than-fiction tale in search of truths. But the filmmaker is less interested in truths than emotions, less concerned with how Vincent's death happened but that it happened; and the incompleteness of her film embodies that sense of loss felt in the face of death. Talking-heads films often flounder due to the fact that they're not about facts, just hearsay; but Morley manages to make that hearsay profound. All she has is people talking about Joyce, wanting to remember Joyce, wishing they hadn't let Joyce go; and all Morley has are these piecemeal testimonies of a person that she never met, and can never know. Vincent's secrets all went to the grave with her, and Dreams Of A Life knows it cannot get them back. Instead, the film sits with that loss, lets it linger eerily, and effect viewers not just in their time in the cinemas, but long after.