Funny Ha Ha (MIFF; USA)
This debut feature from Andrew Bujalski is an unusual festival film in that it did the rounds four years ago. But with Larry Clark’s newbie, Wassup Rockers, being cancelled, the audience that chose to stay and risk their ticket money on an unheralded American indie flick were given a satisfying if unspectacular treat. The film is a refreshingly mature and unpretentious observation of the people, situations and comic minutiae that flitter about and involve Marnie (Kate Dollenmayer), the central character. The predominantly young audience at the screening obviously found plenty to empathise with—both with laughter and the breathtakingly cringe-worthy moments of insecure flirtatious mumbling or inconsiderate throw-away insults. Bucking the stereotypical debut pitfalls, this is not an undergrad’s stab at ennui or a hyperkinetic pastiche of genres, thank God. And, though it might seem a relatively slight film, its honesty, warmth and humour suggest a young filmmaker with an excellent ear for dialogue and a confident hand with actors.
The Willow Tree (MIFF; Iran)
Cinema began as a purely visual medium. The shock and fright that the Lumiere brothers caused in their virgin audience came about because seeing the world through the lens of a camera is like seeing for the first time — witness Dziga Vertov’s 1929 paean to the new medium, Man With a Movie Camera, and you get a sense of this fascination. Thus, film is perfectly suited to director Majid Majidi’s exploration in The Willow Tree of a blind man regaining his sight.
After a quietly foreboding passage of voiceover, the movie opens its eyes on a scene of sylvan innocence, with a father and his young daughter racing sticks down a stream. We soon learn that the father, Youssef, a university professor, is blind. At home, his wife, Roya, sits and translates pages of texts into Braille for him. When he sits down to read them in his courtyard, a sudden gust of wind blows them away and Roya has to scramble across the garden to retrieve them, while Youssef grasps desperately at whatever he can feel near him. He is cared for, he is loved, and loves in return but we are given a sense of his dependence, his powerlessness in the face of nature’s occasional rushes.
Having flown to Paris to treat a possible cancer under his eye, he undergoes a cornea transplant that should restore his sight, which he lost when he was 8 years old. In a tremulously powerful section of the movie, Youssef impatiently peels back the padding around his eyes to the shocking sensation of light. Still with the carefully lifted feet of a blind man, he pads excitedly into the hospital corridor as a single tear of blood falls from his still-scarred eyes. It is a moment of subtle horror — after all, a new sense is terrifying.
The Willow Tree is unrelenting cinema. It challenges our notion of perception and gives us the visceral rush of seeing as though for the first time. When Youssef returns to Iran he is greeted by a crowd of family and friends. In a scene that will stay with me for a very long time, the soundtrack drops away as Youssef looks at these faces without recognition — which one is Roya? Is it the beautiful young woman with the video camera? Youssef hopes so. And there is the tragedy — with all this renewed sensation, the reference points of the past need to be realigned, the world which satisfies the other senses might not satisfy the eyes, and in that moment at the airport, Majidi brings to bear both the revelatory joy of the new and the plummeting realisation of how much was lacking before.
As Youssef, Parviz Parastui is astonishing. It is his performance, as well as that of Afarin Obeisi as his mother, that lifts The Willow Tree above anyone reproaching it with sentimentality. It is a deeply religious film, in the best sense of the word — a moral fable that is not moralistic.
Vivre Sa Vie (France, 1962)
In the popular and academic consciousness, Jean-Luc Godard is the personification of the Nouvelle Vague. With Godard as the supreme auteur, other French filmmakers like François Truffaut have often been forced into his penumbra. Yet, how many filmgoers have actually seen a Godard film aside from the ubiquitous A Bout de Souffle? And where does his reputation stem from?
With the release of Vivre Sa Vie as part of Madman’s Directors Suite series, Australia is one of the few countries producing this remarkable early Godard feature on DVD. Filmed in 1962, soon after the release of Truffaut’s Jules et Jim, Godard’s film has neither the epic sweep nor the moments of joyous reverie that Truffaut provides, but is, in its own quiet way, a work of startling originality and contemplation.
With Brechtian élan, the film is cut into a dozen tableaux by simple white-on-black titles that herald, not without ambiguity or irony, the subsequent action. The central character, Nana, played by the effortlessly sexy Anna Karina, is a young woman from Moselle who has come to Paris in search of stardom but soon slips into the demimonde of daylight streetwalkers in order to pay her debts. Around this simple conceit, Godard weaves a tapestry of characters, documentary-like dialogues and literary references.
The intertextuality of the film is both implicit—Nana is the name of an Emile Zola novel on prostitution and Karina closely resembles silent film star Louise Brooks, who starred as a demimondaine in the 1929 Pandora’s Box—and explicit—Montaigne and Poe are quoted, a clip of Jeanne D’Arc by Carl Dreyer is shown. The common factor is that we are asked to reflect on these allusions with respect to Nana, who is often watched by the camera—lovingly and voyeuristically—as she listens to others. At times, a quotation is accompanied by the camera panning away from the actors and onto the street scene outside the café, contextualising Nana’s story and reminding us of the untold stories outside the frame.
The intertextuality also serves to engage us critically but not in a necessarily detached manner. Indeed, the tone of the film has an unsettlingly believable coolness that nevertheless allows for empathy. Godard does not seem to be interested in psychology, but something beyond that, something essential and poetic. In some ways the film appears set on displaying rather than telling, in proving rather than analysing, but it is impossible to dismiss it as superficial flippancy. We perhaps get a clue as to what Godard is trying to achieve in stripping away the psychological interior life of the characters when one character quotes a little girl: “A bird is an animal with an inside and outside. Remove the outside, there’s the inside. Remove the inside, and you see the soul.” At least in Vivre Sa Vie, she’s right.
The DVD provides a fine print but the subtitles are at times negligently sparse in their translation and Francophones will be treated to a richer level of verbal exploration. The extras section has an informative commentary from Adrian Martin and a treat in the shape of a kinetic, funny early short film by Godard and Truffaut called Une Histoire d’Eau.