Side thoughts and footnotes collated from our festival correspondents at the Telecom 2007 New Zealand International Film Festivals.


A stunning, dramatic and at times brutal film, Marion Cottilard plays Edith Piaf like a confused, wounded bird – her wide blue eyes are what stay with you. The film is not so much interested with the details of Piaf’s professional life, although her rise to fame is charted, but with her personal life – a stream of tragedies that lead to her drug abuse and early death. Although she emerges a triumphant French heroine, her background and coarse private persona are thoroughly (and at some points scathingly) exposed. This is what makes this biopic rise above the rest – it truly interrogates its subject. This ethic, coupled with Cottilard’s dedicated performance and Piaf’s amazing songs makes La Vie En Rose an excellent centrepiece for the Festival and illuminating viewing for anyone interested in Piaf and her music.—Helen Sims


Following Al Gore’s barnstorming An Inconvenient Truth, The Planet is another important, engaging documentary about climate change and our general plundering of the environment. Dryly witty Oxford Professor George Monbiot is a highlight of the talking heads. A Chinese entrepreneur who talks about how costs don’t worry him and an Indian TV presenter who enthuses about consumerist “fantasy land” and “the killer instinct” are grimly amusing. But there’s no spinning those receding glaciers.—Alexander Bisley


They made movies differently in the seventies. The stories were simpler, more direct, lacking the convultion of more recent films. Electra Glide in Blue begins with a beautifully filmed suicide, all in close-up and washed out colour, evoking any number of classic westerns. It then leaps over to CHiPs (albeit in Arizona), throws in a love triangle, a good cop, bad cop, impotent cop, a few hippies, and a mad old fella. Two highway patrolmen have a dream – one to pimp his ride (his standard issue Electra Glide motorcycle); the other to move up to homicide squad. With help from the suicide they both realise their dreams, then watch as it fall apart – horribly. It’s another parable about the destruction of the American Dream, the loss of a nation’s innocence, and the complexity of people’s moral compasses. Then, of course, you have the landscape. The majestic Monument Valley. Star of a thousand films. Iconic. Throw in a classic car chase – here they’re pursuing motorcycles – and you can’t escape the fact that Electra really wants to be a Western.

Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky shoots landscapes. Industrial landscapes. His images are stunningly beautiful. They could be picture postcards if the subject matter wasn’t so bleak. As a photographer I’m interested in the same territory Burtynsky explores. In part, I think that explains why I was underwhelmed by Manufactured Landscapes, a documentary which follows him around Asia in the midst of a current project. Overriding is the question of why the film is being made: it didn’t seem to be about the photographer or his process/art, nor was it typically about what he was photographing. Director Jennifer Baichwal spends little time discussing Burtynsky’s approach or motivation, while also lacking was the hard-hitting moral grandstanding of An Inconvenient Truth. Left begging is the knowledge of know why he chose to such locations, how he maneuvered around red tape, what he was wanting to say with the work, and what response he was hoping to elicit from the viewer. Like his images we only get some of the story, albeit gloriously rendered. In an extraordinary opening shot, the camera tracks along a factory floor for minutes, covering hundreds of metres, watching brightly uniformed young workers seated row after row, churning out various products for our mass comsumption – in a nutshell the frightening reality of ‘sweatshops’, the inherent wastefulness of throwaway consumerism, and my own implicitness in the cycle.—Andy Palmer


Straddled somewhere between Straight Time and Clean, Sherrybaby treads familiar ground: a junkie, fresh out of jail, resolves to turn over a new leaf, make good with her young daughter, fend off a whip-cracking parole officer, and win back the trust of her brother and sister-in-law. Like the Ulu Grosbard and Olivier Assayas films, this wagers heavily on the gravitas of its lead performance, and Maggie Gyllenhaal delivers, at least so much in painfully wearing the skin of a white trash whore. No disrespect to the incomparable Maggie Cheung, but Gyllenhaal’s turn as a mother on the rebound is a dirtier, more desperate act in maternal affairs, at once swollen, naked, angelic and foul. Even after the intolerable Requiem for a Dream, movies about addiction ironically won’t go away, and while Sherrybaby’s drug posturing is the equivalent of a ‘Holocaust’ vehicle (see: Kate Winslet in Extras) for its gutsy Hollywood star, it remains purposefully down-to-earth, allowing its hard knock drama to evolve and follow a natural course.

Like a Gregg Araki film, but without any humour, Chris Sivertson’s The Lost revels in the nihilism of youth. The resulting picture is, among other things, reprehensible, misogynistic, and utterly abhorrent. Ray Pye is a small town stud who guns down two ‘lezzies’ in the bush one night, bullies his terrified friends into disposing of the bodies, and returns home to live out his bottomless Norman Bates existence – though this is much less Hitchcock worship than it is wholesale American Psycho. A narcissistic, stovepipe-suffocated proxy for Patrick Bateman (complete with sociopathic smirk), he lures several women into his web, before acting out an obscene emo-fantasy against the world. Viewed in the midst of Virginia Tech and other modern manifestations of loner rage, there’s something terribly irresponsible about Sivertson’s egregious, overearnest bloodletting, and in denying the funhouse conventions of horror, he even lacks the cushion of genre to fall back on – a safety net from which the film’s disregard for life could be taken with a grain of salt. Apologists of cultish transgression may find a salvageable video nasty here; for the rest of us, The Lost comes awfully close to snuff, ending on a traumatic sour note that’s brash in its abruptness, profound in its arbitrariness, but otherwise despicable for its lack of context.—Tim Wong