The Sydney Film Festival opens on Wednesday, kicking off with a screening of the Naughty Nicholas Cave-starring docu-drama 20,000 Days On Earth, then delivering 11 more days overflowing with cinematic riches. The program is, as always, vast and daunting, but your old pal Film Carew has been throwing himself in, watching as much SFF stuff as humanly possible. Like:
ABUSE OF WEAKNESS
Catherine Breillat is no stranger to turning herself into a character in her films (see: 2002's Sex Is Comedy), but her 14th feature is profoundly personal. With Isabelle Huppert as Breillat's stand-in, it coldly, cruelly chronicles her recovery from a 2004 stroke, and her relationship with a con-man (rapper Kool Shen) who grifts her of 600,000 Euro.
APPROPRIATE BEHAVIOUR
The debut film from The Slope's Desiree Akhavan - as writer/director/star - is an amiable if unremarkable rom-com in which she, as a close-to-home Persian-American hipster, struggles with the humiliations of awful employment, cultural baggage, questionable sexual choices, and being-dumped heartache. It ain't the next Tiny Furniture, but it's a pleasing time-killer.
BABYLON
The movie-length pilot for a mooted British TV series finds Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong (the smart-asses behind Peep Show and Chris Morris's Four Lions) penning a series about PR spin-doctory in Scotland Yard, with Brit Marling as the AOK USA TED talker brought aboard to integrate English Police's media policies with modern-day social-media mores. It's all-too-timely, satirical, and silly in turn; with the cracking-pace of its ultra-tight script actually the perfect vehicle for director Danny Boyle's hyperactive, jittery digi-modernism.
FOR THOSE WHO CAN TELL NO TALES
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Jasmila Zbanic's flick finds a holidaying Sydney woman (Kym Vercoe) staying at a Bosnian 'spa' that was once used for brutal ends during the Balkan Wars; leading to an obsession - and borderline paranoia - about the cultural acceptance of wartime horrors, especially if perpetrated against women. It sounds profound, but it turns out so-so; undercut by a shaky lead turn and a tendency to dramatically literalise its themes.
GABRIELLE
If the premise 'two people with intellectual disabilities fall in love' brings back horrifying memories of the Juliette Lewis/Giovanni Ribisi disaster The Other Sister, then Louise Archambault's Gabrielle is a glorious tonic. As with the kids in Philippe Falardeau's Monsieur Lazhar (with whom it shares producers), its paramours are given the chance to portray complex characters with conflicting - and sometimes dark - desires; Archambault's socio-realist approach allowing the emotion to be earned, not contrived.
God Help The Girl
GOD HELP THE GIRL
Stuart Murdoch, frontman for twee-pop legends Belle & Sebastian, makes his filmmaking debut with a sentimental, spiritual, all-too-personal musical about a trio of cuties (Emily Browning, Olly Alexander, Hannah Murray) starting a band. There's countless indie-music references, B&S cameos, and lines (“you're a bloody tea-drinker, pal, you shouldn't be in a band”) Murdoch himself probably heard 20 years ago.
ILO ILO
Crowd-pleasing dramedy about the definitions of family and care in an economically-downturning Singapore? Or, secretly-horrifying portrait of the world's most detestable pre-adolescent dickwad and his creepy crush on his Filipino nanny?
IRANIAN
Exiled Iranian documentarian Mehran Tamadon invites a host of mullahs into a holiday house he wants to turn into a model secular society, in which he - atheist heathen - can happily cohabit with men of Islamic law. What unfolds is a fascinating verbal parlour-game in which Tamadon's surety in his own beliefs erodes in the face of charismatic orators who match unwavering faith with the silver-tongued parries of performing lawyers.
Is The Man Who Is Tall Happy?
IS THE MAN WHO IS TALL HAPPY?
A charming, disarming 'animated conversation' in which Michel Gondry sits down Noam Chomsky to talk life and philosophy, and uses his words as a spring-board for childlike hand-drawn animation. The result is scant in narrative direction, but alive with ideas and wild with dreams.
JOE
David Gordon Green moves out of his Hollywood-cheque-cashing phase for a return to the Deep South; with shades of his past both Southern Gothic (Undertow) and mystically miserablist (George Washington). It features crazy ol' Nic Cage, Mud's Tye Sheridan, and a host of real hillbillies and hobos; but the pleasing vérité melts away once the shoot-'em-up guns come out.
JOY OF MAN'S DESIRING
Denis Côté's Bestiaire was a silent, contemplative, observationist look at animals in captivity; here, he looks at captive humans, chronicling the daily drudgery of factory work. Yet, as Côté's films so often tend towards the slippery and wry - and blur the lines of fiction and non - soon Joy Of Man's Desiring betrays hints of subversive play; its workers 'actors', its pounding machines grand sexual symbols.
Manakamana
MANAKAMANA
Harvard's Sensory Ethnography Laboratory was behind 2009's sublime Sweetgrass and last year's mind-altering film-of-the-year, Leviathan. Manakamana is every bit as amazing: 12 single-take shots of 'pilgrims' ascending to a Nepalese mountain-top monastery via a cable-car, a journey juxtaposing mundaneity with divinity. It makes for a meditative, transcendent experience.
MINERS SHOT DOWN
Rehad Desai summons the appropriate steely outrage in this profound piece of cine-journalism, which explores the 2012 massacre of striking South African mineworkers. Desai sees the tragedy as horrifying symbol of these globalised, late-capitalist times: third-world bloodshed lubricating the money-making gears of multi-national machinery.
OMAR
Hany Abu-Assad's highly-symbolic picture starts out as sweet tale of two young lovers divided by an Occupied Territories wall, yet continually amps up the intrigue as it becomes both political thriller and work of Shakespearean betrayal. All the double-crosses give the film a sense of breathless claustrophobia, but it feels too dramatically cute to summon bona fide profundity.
Palo Alto
PALO ALTO
Third-generation Gia Coppola makes an impressive photographic debut with Palo Alto, where - in a manner not too dissimilar from Aunt Sofia - she imbues the various bad choices of a cross-section of awkward teenagers with a sense of lingering melancholy. But for its soft charms, James Franco's writing too often serves up the simple clichés of privileged youth doing stupid shit with little thought of repercussions.
THE POSSIBILITIES ARE ENDLESS
Edward Lovelace and James Hall's impressionist portrait of the life of Edwyn Collins is anything but your regular rockumentary. Artfully interpreting Collins' mental state following a stroke, it willingly inhabits his confusion: mounting a cinematic mosaic out of environmental imagery, dramatised memory, and Collins' oft-perplexed narration.
ROCK THE CASBAH
Laïla Marrakchi's crowd-pleasin' pic uncorks the dead-patriarch-reunites-a-scattered-family premise for a colourful, soap-operatic portrait of squabbling siblings, two-dimensional caricatures, dramatic cliché, and terrible child-acting. The glittering cast (Nadine Labaki, Lubna Azabal, Hiam Abbass, Omar Sharif) and costly song-placements show the production's 'class', but spiritually it's a midday telemovie.
Ruin
RUIN
Amiel Courtin-Wilson (Bastardy, Hail) is far-and-away Australia's most interesting filmmaker, and he furthers that status with this lyrical, beautifully-photographed piece of pure cinema, about a pair of lawless lovers fleeing from Phnom Penh along the Mekong.
THE SECOND GAME
“You can't make a film out of this,” says the father of filmmaker Corneliu Porumboiu, and he may have a point, given that The Second Game calls into question what a 'film' may actually be. It's, moreso, a commentary-track, with father/son talking - replete with plentiful awkward silences - over top of a grainy video of a 1988 soccer match dad refereed a quarter-century ago. It's a dry, droll conversation about football, filmmaking, and life in a socialist state that will charm, annoy, or bore audiences in turn.
STOP THE POUNDING HEART
'Devout religious girl meets rough-and-tumble trailer-part boy in rural Texas' hardly sounds like a great premise, but Roberto Minervini's remarkable film uses astounding vérité to draw audiences close to the shaky faith and churning emotions of its adolescent heroine; to hear her pounding heart. The Texan milieu is presented without caricature or judgment, and photographed beautifully. Minervini worked with the same farming family on 2011's The Passage, and that familiarity lends this film an astonishing sense of intimacy.
A STORY OF CHILDREN AND FILM
Mark Cousins, the laconic chronicler of the 15-hour history The Story Of Film: An Odyssey, employs his encyclopaedic cinematic knowledge to author a fabulously freeform portrait of children on screen; from wonky kids in MGM musicals to symbolist dreams in Socialist Albania, from ET to The Red Balloon, Tarkovsky to Panahi. It's cinephilia of the sweetest stripe: wandering, philosophical, joyous, human.
TAMAKO IN MORATORIUM
Nobuhiro Yamashita makes a companion-piece to 2003's No One's Ark with this portrait of the post-college malaise; with Atsuko Maeda (of J-Pop concoction AKB48) the titular slacker mired in the directionless depression of a life without career ambition. Yamashita remains a keen chronicler of social awkwardness, minor humiliations, and passive-aggressive behaviour, and Tamako In Moratorium offers abundant charms for those who like things minimal and droll.
TIM'S VERMEER
Wildly-entertaining documentary-as-experiment in which inventor Tim Jenison recreates Vermeer's The Music Lesson with only 16th-century technology, out to prove that the Dutch master's proto-photorealism came not from mystical genius, but looking at life through a lens.
Tom At The Farm
TOM AT THE FARM
Hyper-prolific Québécois boy-wonder Xavier Dolan embraces genre with this psychological-thriller; in which a queer city-kid finds his rural panic turning into an ever-escalating, game-playing, happy-family nightmare. The classic tension-building score suggests Dolan's out to summon Hitchcock, but Tom At The Farm lands closer to the early perversions of François Ozon.
THE TWO FACES OF JANUARY
Hossein Amini's directorial debut begins with plentiful glamour: Viggo Mortensen, Kirsten Dunst, and Oscar Isaac dallying about in 1960s Athens; traipsing in Mad Men finery through ruins, restaurants, and luxury hotels. Then the thriller machinations kick into gear, and that early charm vanishes, evaporating as if left in the hot Greek sun.
UKRAINE IS NOT A BROTHEL
Debutante Australian documentarian Kitty Green spent 14 months living with infamous performance-art protest group Femen, a Kiev-based collective out to challenge patriarchy by way of high-profile topless protests. Green peers beyond the blonde façade and sees the troubling politics at Femen's core, making for a profound film about complicity and compromise.
THE UNKNOWN KNOWN
Errol Morris's companion-piece to 2003's The Fog Of War: Eleven Lessons From The Life Of Robert S. McNamara attempts to cross-examine W. Bush-era villain Donald Rumsfeld underneath the glare of the filmmaker's 'interrotron'. But Rumsfeld proves a less rueful, less reflective figure; blithely smirking his way through a conversation chronicling a career in service of bellicose American imperialism.
WATERMARK
After looking at monolithic Manufactured Landscapes, Jennifer Baichwal and Edward Burtynsky portray the relationship between humans and water; showing vast landscapes radically altered by human industry and ingenuity, then coming in for close-ups of the workers toiling in such environments. It's a profound documentary that measures up to new-millennial classics like Nikolaus Geyrhalter's Our Daily Bread and Michael Glawogger's Workingman's Death; inviting you to look at the planet in a whole new way.
