WILD TALES
Wild Tales is aptly named. Damián Szifrón’s suite of six savage revenge-stories is a wildly-enjoyable parade of wildly-told tales; a short-story collection of chaptered, Twilight Zone-style stories each inhabiting a discrete universe, unmoored from the other. But it’s no scattershot Anthology Of Interest. Instead, each tale functions as moral fable, tackling ideas of revenge: showing plans of vengeance, quirks of karmic retribution, and opportunistic chance for fateful payback.
Passengers on a plane discover that they all connected to the same hapless classical musician, who’s waiting behind the curtain. On a cold and rainy night, a truckstop waitress takes the order for a local goon who ruined her family, and the cook suggests they lace his food with rat poison. Two highway rivals —one rich jerk, one redneck— come head-to-head when one gets a flat tyre. A demolitions expert turns apoplectic when forced to pay for a parking ticket, heading into a downward spiral. Rich parents cook up a cover-up after their son perpetrates a hit-and-run. And, in the glorious finale Until Death Do Us Part, a wedding ceremony turns into a pre-emptive, rapidly-escalating war of the roses.
All essentially play out the same way: deftly delivering the set-up, escalating rapidly, pulling a reverse —or, indeed, several increasingly-ridiculous reverses— before delivering a black-comic payoff. There’s no revolution in its filmmaking, but if you’re the kind of cinemagoer that loves nothing more than a ripping yarn, Wild Tales will be a sure delight.
WHEN MARNIE WAS THERE
No one does tween melodrama like Studio Ghibli. When Marnie Was There —the second film for Hiromasa Yonebayashi, following 2010’s The Secret World Of Arrietty— begins in the most familiar way: a 12-year-old girl moves from Tokyo to spend her summer with an aunt and uncle by the sea. Anna’s not doing so well, our cusp-of-adolescence lead an increasingly-withdrawn, self-loathing lass prone to both asthma and anxiety attacks. But she also has the familiar mettle of a Ghibli heroine: interested more in art, daydreams, and a sense of the mystical than in what society expects her to be.
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What unfolds, in Marnie Was There, is a coming-of-age summer touched with love, desire, self-agency, and the kind of rural, traditional, folkloric magic unseen in Tokyo, oft seen in anime. Anna befriends a mysterious blonde girl who lives —well, lives, isn’t entirely the right world— in an abandoned manor-house on the marsh. Marnie only comes out at night, once the tide is high, and is dressed in roaring-20s frockery, giving clues that she’s obviously a spectre. But whose ghost? And why is she still here, in this old house?
The story —based on Joan G. Robinson’s 1969 children’s book— is, essentially, a portrait of obsessive friendship, an adolescent love-story in which a solitary child becomes consumed with this blonde-girl of her night-time visions. It chronicles the disproportionate sway that a first love can have over an adolescent heart; how an insular enclave of shared secrets can start to seem like not a world, but the whole world.
Eventually, it pulls back, becoming a picture of family histories, of cycles of suffering and abuse, and how they can claw into the lives of the young. Its denouement finds the film building to a grand melodramatic reveal of buried secrets, shaking skeletons from the closet with such a flood of hard-won emotion that it almost becomes overwhelming. There’s none of the otherworldly fantasias for which Ghibli are best known, but When Marnie Was There succeeds by doing what the studio always has: not trivialising the feelings of its young subjects (and audience), but giving them real credence.
THE CUT
The Festival Of German Films opens this week, and, like all smaller fests, it brings with it a host of horrifying commercial comedies from the home country, and a scattering of art-movie outliers. This year there’s films like the formalist religious-oppression art-piece Stations Of The Cross, the amazing American/African cross-cultural first-contact/ethnomusicology documentary Song From The Forest, and the B-grade Dardennes socio-political stylings of angry-urchin drama Jack. There’s also ‘event’ screenings where experimentalist Thomas Köner scores FW Murnau’s eternal Faust, and where Fatih Akin’s 2009 lark Soul Kitchen is brought back for foodie-courtin’ cross-promotional gastronomic tie-in.
But the highlight is Akin’s latest film —and first fiction feature since Soul Kitchen— The Cut. Akin’s Turkish heritage has informed most of his filmography. His documentaries Crossing The Bridge: The Sound Of Istanbul and Polluting Paradise were Turkish tales shot in country; Head-On and The Edge Of Heaven each explored the lives of German-born Turks, and, in turn, his own cultural heritage.
The Cut has been called, by its maker, a successor to those two films, part of a trilogy he —with Kieslowskian grandeur— has called Love, Death, & The Devil. Wrestling with the ultimate burden of his heritage, it’s Akin’s film about the Armenian genocide, made to coincide with the 100-year anniversary of the expulsion of Armenians from the Ottoman empire.
It starts out seeming like a rote historical epic, with Tahar Rahim as the handsome family-man (speaking heroic English, not subtitled, villainous Turkish!) suddenly set afoul of the vagaries of oppressive-forces, he and his family lost to history. But the story takes an almost immediate left-turn: when a fidgety Turkish executioner fails to properly slit Rahim’s throat, he’s instead left mute.
The Cut, in turn, oft goes without language; preferring to foreground the squalling post-rock of its score, by Alexander Hacke of Einstürzende Neubauten. Its image-centric storytelling, and its hero’s mute state, are both tellingly symbolic: his silence that of the Armenian people, their stifled voice; the silence of the film the failure of the global community to come out in open, united condemnation; silence the currency, too, of Turkish denials of genocide.
Rahim wanders through the deserts of war like a biblical figure, eventually walking into the hell of ad-hoc deportation camps, tent cities of the starving and dying. Then war ends, and he keeps on wandering: The Cut sprawling out over the years, and across the planet. He’s searching for his twin daughters, who somehow also survived the war. This, too, is symbolic: one man wandering through the diaspora, the remains of stateless people, scattered around the world like seeds on the breeze.
