LFF 2010: five final festival films to wrap up with...

Craig here from Dark Eye Socket with my LFF wrap-up.

As of tonight the BFI London Film Festival is done for another year. It's been a stellar year all told, if the surplus of reports are to be believed. And I'd willingly add a further approving nod to the list. I didn't manage to see everything I wanted (juggling festival times and dates with travel arrangements is an art – one that's open to fateful intervention...and multiple tube delays), but what I saw was on the whole a bumper crop. Roll on next year, I say. Here are five previous reviews, selected from the films I saw:  Uncle Boonmee, A Screaming Man, Winter Vacation, Rare Exports and What I Love the Most. And below are five final mini reviews of a few festival highlights.

Thomas Vinterberg introduced his new film, Submarino, in a cheeky fashion: “if all goes well, you’ll be depressed at the end of the film. Enjoy yourselves!” It was no happy time sure, but it was an enthralling film, despite its determinedly grim subject matter. It follows two brothers’ hard, poverty-stricken lives in contemporary Copenhagen; a family tragedy as kids has left them scarred and emotionally unable to cope with adult existence. Hope is hard to grasp, but not too far away; redemption comes at a cost but may just stop dead the cycle of despair plaguing one or both of the brothers. The characters' direness isn’t forced or over baked and sympathy is well-earned. Lead actors Jakob Cedergren and Peter Plaugborg are excellent as, respectively, the older and younger siblings. Vinterberg’s humanistic approach is thoroughly rewarding and the tautness of the script ensures we become embroiled in the brothers’ plights. It’s strangely an easy film to like, but not always pleasant to watch. B-

 Submarino

Abel, the second directorial effort by actor Diego Luna, was a complete contrast to Submarino (I saw them consecutively). The story of a boy, the titular Abel, who returns home from a stay at a psychiatric hospital to resume living with his mother and siblings – only to assume the role of patriarch of the house, brought on by his father’s disappearance years earlier. The family go along with the ruse in the hope that it aids the boy’s recovery. It’s an amusing, sweet-natured look at how families are truly peculiar to themselves more so than to others. It also questions the role of the father in modern Mexican life and makes more than a few choice and aptly conveyed criticisms of male-dominated hierarchies.

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We Can't Wait #9: SOMEWHERE

"We Can't Wait: Summer and Beyond" continues with what is sure to be one of the dreamiest films of the year, in mood if not in content.

Daddy (Dorff) and Daughter (Fanning)

Somewhere
Directed by: Sofia Coppola
Starring: Stephen Dorff, Elle Fanning and Michelle Monaghan
Synopsis: A decadent actor gets an unexpected visit from his young daughter and begins to reexamine his life.
Brought to you by Focus Features
Release Date: TBA but we're assuming September/October? That's the Coppola time frame.

Nathaniel: We've had several discussions, you and I, about the inherent dreaminess of Sofia Coppola pictures. I'm curious to see how her haziness matches the "hard living" of the actor character in Somewhere. I don't mean hazy pejoratively as in a vague or cloudy minded film but in the contemplative drift her films tend to provoke in the viewer. I've loved all of her features so I'm hoping this is no exception.

I'm intrigued that she's shifting her gaze to a man, despite my love for her 'dreamy girls' milieu whether they're embodied by Kirsten Dunst (twice over sensationally) or Scarlett Johansson (once most successfully). But I'm not so pleased that she's switching cinematographers. Obviously Harris Savides is a genius, but I so enjoyed her collaboration with Lance Acord. He recently lensed her ex-husband's Where the Wild Things Are superbly...

Sofia's previous cinematographer Lance Acord (Lost in Translation,
Marie Antoinette) and her new one Harris Savides (Birth, Milk, Zodiac)

I'm starting to drift contemplatively so I'll toss it to you with this: even though I'm excited, I can't say I'm really a "fan" of either lead actor. Can you imagine the wrath of Dakota if Elle gets an Oscar nomination first?

JA: If there's somewhere where drifting contemplatively is welcomed, it's in conversation about Miss Sofia's movies. But yeah, the Fanning house is not somewhere to be on nomination morning if such a thing were to come to pass. (But if you do find yourself there, please have an Abigail Breslin mask on hand. Hilarity will ensue and by hilarity I mean large sharp objects and by ensue I mean flung at your face.)

I'd been imagining the focus on the Dorff-Fanning relationship to be something like the one on the Murray-Johannson relationship in Lost in Translation, in that they're both pretty much the focus, but I guess that's just my imaginings having already run off with themselves sensing all the opportunities for long shots of Elle staring off into space in dimly lit rooms of the Chateau Marmont. Prime staring real estate! So I hadn't really thought of Coppola's gaze here being any more male-focused than it was there. I guess after three films with such a strong voice already in place I have trouble imagining Sofia able to resist the urge to drift off with Elle just a little bit.

<--- Elle Fanning attending the premiere of big sis's last hit, The Twilight Saga: New Moon

Either way, whomever the camera's pointed at, Savides brings me no fear! He's proven himself many times over to be a terrific custodian of the elongated space-out. I mean, Elephant, man. Gerry! Doesn't get much spacier than that. And we just saw the wonders he can work with the sun-dappled backyards and side streets of LA in Greenberg.

Can't say I'm a fan of Dorff really either but I do think he's an inspired choice, and I have a feeling he's got something in there to deliver. Anybody that was in an episode of Father Dowling's Mysteries is cool with me.

Nathaniel: And maybe anyone who has ever played a vampire is due for a career resurgence in this new decade?

Dorff on set in Milan

How do I drift so far off topic? Readers? do you go into dreamy trances watching Sofia Coppola's work? Are you eager to go there again?
*

Zodiac (2007)

David Fincher's second foray into the serial killer genre he helped popularize is not a thriller like his first. This change in tone is apparent straightaway. Se7en's title sequence was loud, creepy and strange --you imagined it was coming directly from some psychotically unbalanced psyche, possibly the killers own: all disorientation, decay and dread. You'd think that any film that begins with a double homicide on the 4th of July, as Zodiac does, would also start with a bang. But the film sidesteps your expectations frequently. This is a hushed drama in a genre that thrives on shock cuts and cheap seat-jumping sound cues. When the titles arrive in Zodiac they're merely names on a screen. Their only embellisment is a gently transparent codebreaking fade --a reference to the killer's fondness for ciphers. This is a serial killer film that's not really about the killing, the serial killer, or even the victims.

Quick Kills and Slow Deaths.

I'd like to see it again for more conclusive evidence but I'm not even sure that Zodiac gives you a protagonist. Or if it does, I'm not sure that it's Jake Gyllenhaal. He plays Robert Graysmith the Chronicle cartoonist who eventually wrote the best seller on the unsolved murders upon which this film is based. Graysmith is important to the proceedings but there are many characters in the sprawling cast and he disappears for big chunks of the narrative. The main character is just happens to be the investigation itself. Against the storytelling odds, it's a doozy of a protagonist: complicated and evocative, charismatic but frustrating, explicitly revealed and still unknowable.

Notice that there are 3 glasses of Aquavelva on this table. I'm imagining the third is mine
only Fincher edited me out of the scene -damn him! That is so my kind of drink.

Movies based on real life events are often shoehorned into traditional story structures, with character intro beginnings, plotty action-packed middles, and resolution-filled endings. And if you need this in a movie, you're unlikely to respond to this particular procedural drama. Zodiac is rather like a continuous middle. Yet it has ample intrigue to offset its lack of conventional satisfactions. Credit Fincher's fussed over but sharp-eyed direction and the fine pace-attentive editing from Angus Wall (Panic Room) and Kirk Baxter (Killing Joe). Zodiac doesn't so much build momentum as maintain it, but it does so rather well. The film is also great looking thanks to one of the best cinematographers in the business, Harris Savides (Birth). David Fincher isn't often mentioned as an actor's director but he's sure-handed there as well. Jake Gyllenhaal is as earnestly appealing as ever and the supporting cast deliver their characters with precision. One casting decision that intrigued me was the choice of three actors (Gyllenhaal, Anthony Edwards and Mark Ruffalo) with relatively high or quiet voices and one (Robert Downey Jr) with obvious personal demons that match his characters. The story is brutal but there's a fascinating counterpoint softness and vulnerability to the men inside of it.

I admired Zodiac more than I loved it but it held my attention throughout (and this viewer isn't particularly drawn to procedurals in the first place). Fincher offered up abundant details, sometimes tangentially, as he attempts to build an ambitious portrait of a time, place, and community in static unresolved fear. Even without the more traditional narrative trappings of the genre, Fincher's latest holds your gaze and engages your mind. The Zodiac killings, he illustrates, had a disturbing ripple effect. The initial victims die quick gruesome deaths. But the resulting investigation offers up more victims still. Their deaths are slower and of the social, marital, career and soul variety. With disturbing inevitably this true life drama becomes a killer too. The Zodiac claimed he was collecting slaves for his afterlife. This investigation mimics his body count (metaphorically speaking) and turns his delusional purpose into an unfortunate reality: you can watch it pick off each cast member one by one: it eventually enslaves them all.
B+/A-