Bruised by another grueling Telecom New Zealand International Film Festivals, TIM WONG discovered the hardest hitters were those who refused to yield to convention in a programme of largely complacent, uncompelling tone.


IS IT a sign of a benign programme when Paul Verhoeven rocks your boat? Gouged out of the remnants of Soldier of Orange and Showgirls, Black Book, while by no means radical Verhoeven, stood out as the most unapologetic film of the festival. Whereas fellow ex-pat Euro Werner Herzog coasted through with an able, unremarkable addition to the oeuvre, Verhoeven, never one to make concessions or ply the middle ground, insisted we all sit up and take notice: if not for his compulsive flesh and bloodletting, or the sexual artillery of leading lady Carice van Houten, then for the single, revitalising statement that war can be fun.

Granted, there’s something precarious about Verhoeven’s schlock treatment when spiked with the severity of World War II: can a Dutch resistance fighter be reproduced as so drop-dead gorgeous in times of profound human suffering? Or what to make of the director’s signature perversion, where van Houten is stripped and saturated in human waste? Not quite the coprophilia fetish, Verhoeven’s compulsion to shock actually doubles as a remark on the moral quagmire of war, where it’s implicit a little Nazi exists in all of us. Sadism was not exclusive to Germans according to Black Book, and it’s through Verhoeven’s rewriting of the war movie textbook, coupled with an exhilarating big budget craft, that made his the most invigorating – and notwithstanding the constant fidget between fiction and hyper-reality, honest – film of the fortnight.

David Lynch, too, was in unmistakable form, fucking with the human mind and willing heads to explode. Cluttered with the remnants of Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire sure enough can be read as a symptom of encroaching senility, although the instantaneity of the digital format (a natural follow-on from Lynch’s web-based excursions) goes some way to explaining the film’s plotless disorder. Lynch may be losing his marbles, but there’s such vitality – and indeed, truth – to his filmmaking that he can never be accused of being arbitrary, despite Inland Empire’s infuriating internal logic. Liken his twilight to Fellini’s crazy phase as some might, what I admire about Lynch, and for that matter Verhoeven, is the integrity of their uncensored visions, neither relinquishing an inch as aging artists, while both sharing unlikely common ground as purveyors of a cinematic duality. (Lynch’s dream weaving oscillates between fugue states by default; Verhoeven, meanwhile, continues his fascination with ‘double agents’.)


Likewise, both directors refused to yield to convention, and together showed up filmmakers in a festival of largely complacent, uncompelling tone. Often maligned by the churlish for lowering standards, innocuous arthouse staples like Priceless and My Best Friend were not to be discredited – Telecom’s recently reneged sponsorship emphasising just how indispensable they are in sustaining such a large and vital film event in an even smaller country. Admittedly, Priceless was palatable enough in the belly of a full Embassy Theatre, a magnificent venue and diversion from what was predominantly tasteless French confection, and Audrey Tautou’s most dislikeable character to date. Also middling yet exceedingly popular: Romulus, My Father; the odorless Perfume: The Story of a Murderer; and A Mighty Heart, an ad hoc commencement to festivities which carried Cannes currency into opening night, but little else.

Venus, the only film to surpass its prefabricated charm, reconciled late-life sensibilities with rude, ribald appeal. Embracing the wrinkles, niggles, and irritable syndromes of senior citizenry, Peter O’Toole exuded the sort of candour Verhoeven and Lynch were displaying from behind the camera. His performance, which delivered credibility to an otherwise improbable geriatric fantasy, surely earned the approval of those elderly and male in attendance: particularly, one imagines, through acknowledging the latent sexual urges of old men. Black Book’s van Houten and Inland Empire’s Laura Dern – a sight to behold in her most unadulterated outing since Citizen Ruth – provided the festival’s two other singular, domineering performances. Elsewhere, Marion Cotillard (La vie en rose), Christian Bale (Rescue Dawn) and Channing Tatum (A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints) distinguished themselves: Bale’s portrayal of POW Dieter Dengler clearly a lived-in ordeal; in support, Tatum’s best ‘Johnny Boy’ impression stung hard in Dito Montiel’s Queens memoir of a poisonous knucklehead who cannot be reasoned with.

In Rescue Dawn, a compromise was reached between commerce and art, albeit an imbalanced one: amidst Herzog’s formidable jungle textures and burdensome dreams was a diluted personal touch, familiar but not unequivocally so like the imprinted authorship of Black Book, a Paul Verhoeven film in every sense of the word. Contrary to belief, Herzog’s dramatisation of his 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly was never too mainstream to feel unwelcome, yet was also indicative of how moderately the programme was received – where David Fincher’s Zodiac, in multiplexes only a month earlier, would not have looked out of place. Launch night, curiously, saw the sneak preview of the surprising and riveting oceanic misadventure, Deep Water, a film Herzog could have conceivably directed. An unexpected discovery, it precipitated scrutiny of the 160-strong programme, where Rescue Dawn’s uneven complexion mirrored the elusive symbiosis between conservative and avant-garde festival programmers would struggle to achieve.


For all the decorative fixtures at the Telecom 2007 New Zealand International Film Festivals, movies to marvel at were in shorter supply, with attention invariably turning to notable absentees. To be fair, a multitude of factors prevent the arrival of worthier films every year: prints may be scarce, at a premium, or are overbooked; distributors sometimes flat out refuse; failing that, programmers either overlook or wield their curatorial axe. Nonetheless, I was shocked to see Bruno Dumont’s Flandres excluded, a filmmaker whose misanthropic cinema has always found refuge here in the past. Other established favourites to fall off the radar: Hirokazu Kore-eda, whose delightful, elegiac samurai subversion Hana deserved placement (presumably tied up at the Melbourne Film Festival’s director retrospective, it’s a more spirited revisionist piece than The Twilight Samurai); Hong Sang-soo’s Woman on the Beach, had it not been procured (and thus, underexposed) by the Korean Film Festival in late 2006; Aleksandr Sokurov’s The Sun, given Molokh had screened to good word in the past; and though wishful thinking, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Flight of the Red Balloon would have made a terrific catch from Cannes.

Among others, Days of Glory, Fay Grim, State Legislature and Colossal Youth also spring to mind as missed opportunities. In any case, to continue to nit-pick for gaping holes would be to deny the festival’s genuine breakthroughs, and it delivered, at least so much in restoring faith with Jia Zhang-ke’s latest, Still Life: the best in show, and a beacon above what was a significantly weakened Asian selection this year. Korean cinema, especially, found itself unjustly cornered by a pair of bloody gangland melodramas. The strongest of the two, A Dirty Carnival, while not without chops, felt so turgidly stereotypical of Old Boy hysteria that even Park Chan-wook’s post-vengeance departure, I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK – an intolerably eccentric, if far from derivative love story – would have refreshed interest in what remains Eastern Cinema’s most dynamic film industry. Ditto Ad Lib Night – a delicate mystery piece from the director of This Charming Girl – and in a perfect world, Lee Chang-dong’s Secret Sunshine (another wishful acquisition from Cannes).

Still Life, ironically, did little to enhance China’s plummeting image, and was one of three films (Jia’s other contribution the artist companion piece Dong) to document construction of the Three Gorges Dam. In Manufactured Landscapes, Jennifer Baichwal (The True Meaning of Pictures) matches photographer Edward Burtynsky shot-for-shot with a visual tableaux of outrageous wastelands captured famously by her subject in large-format, high-definition still images. Startling in impact, if somewhat manufactured in artistic conception, Burtynsky’s photographs are as alarming in environmental exposé as they are impersonal, inhuman postcards of the industrial world. Alleviating distance, Baichwal integrates occasional on-site interviews into the documentary; one worker, capable of assembling several hundred circuit breakers a day – and proud of it – stands as much-needed testament to the knowledge that China makes this world go round, however culpable in eyes of climate change evangelists, xenophobic consumers, and human rights activists.


Even then, Jia offered the most compellingly human snapshot of those flailing in the dust cloud of China’s exponential growth. In parts resembling an extraterrestrial war zone, the film – chiefly concerning the demolition of villages earmarked for submergence – would have drowned in a tide of hopelessness (as Manufactured Landscapes tends to) without Jia’s intimate, searching portraits to keep it afloat. Buoyant in aesthetic terms, two rapturous films lifted spirits and gave rise to the sublime: Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and a Century, by turns euphoric, visually soothing, and quietly disorienting; and Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park, the most beautiful skate movie ever made. Nobody shoots teenagers quite like Van Sant, an enamoured gaze that ascends to ecstatic, spiralling highs under the lenswork of Christopher Doyle and Rain Kathy Li. And in stark contrast to the precocious parlance of Brick, Van Sant’s young people are soft-spoken, unassuming, and entirely believable.

Heights of near-impeccable drama were said to have been scaled by After the Wedding (Susanne Bier) and The Secret Life of Words (Isabel Coixet), films I neither saw nor needed to having arrived at The Edge of Heaven: the most complete – and for Fatih Akin, finally assured – dramatic turn of the programme despite its mechanical life coincidences, pop-up windows of revelation that were either annoying or intriguing depending on your festival itinerary up until closing night. For me, Akin’s emotional intersections remained moving amidst a narrative stiffness, though were also outmoded in advance: coy meditations like Old Joy and Honour of the Knights proving that nothing needs to happen for a film to engross, while Red Road demonstrating the art of withholding information can be just as effective as spelling it out.

Kissy Kissy, the most accomplished – and thematically redundant – instalment in the ‘Aro Film Movement’, may have tested the patience of those who’d seen it all before (and coming after Mutual Appreciation’s tonally perfect angst, a tough act to follow), but when viewed in context with the Valley’s preceding digital features, can be appreciated as a concluding satire; the exaggerated ensnarement a shrewd in-joke as one observer pointed out. Astutely, its directors Alexander Greenhough and Elric Kane also join the trend of filmmakers who’ve found refuge in the durable, sheltered simplicity of two blokes in solitude. In the film’s Marlborough Sounds segment – where mates Dave and Lee camp out, hoping to reconcile their friendship in the cradle of breathtaking surroundings – we strike upon a resemblance to Old Joy and Honour of the Knights in equal parts, witnessing man in his element bond, recover, take stock, and be at one with nature. Call the scene with Dave masturbating in his sleeping bag while Lee listens in horror a completely odd, unnecessary moment of artistic indulgence, but I think Tsai Ming-liang would have approved: his I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone several notches down in volume from the extremities of The Wayward Cloud, but still utterly entrancing as a dreamscape of sexual malaise.


Doldrums of a deadpan variety lingered in more powder-faced vignettes from Swedish depressionist Roy Andersson, whose follow-up to Songs from the Second Floor differs little in concept and amusement. Stagy and running on empty, one wonders how much longer Andersson can keep his cinema-diorama going. If he does, fingers crossed he conceives another triumphant dream sequence on par with You, the Living’s one highpoint: imagine a girl, pining hopelessly after a rock star, fantasising their marriage in a locomotive tenement which pulls up to a station full of jubilant well-wishers, before chugging off into a honeymoon sunset. Back on earth, few documentaries transcended their subject matter, particularly those about God – forever hung up on religion’s tendency to make fundamentalists look like clowns, Jesus Camp and Audience of One were frightening in their own irrational ways, yet never more than incentives to point and laugh. Of those that did: The Monastery, which attained spiritual harmony where others created rifts; Helvetica simply by virtue of its contemporary design insight, an untapped resource; and the aforementioned Deep Water, which made a mockery of the fishy survivalism recounted in Touching the Void.

Some final highs and lows: the homecoming of Eagle vs Shark, Taika Waititi’s gentle, whole-hearted debut, at once assured in its spin-off geekery, proud of its twangy New Zealandness, and more Sasquatch Dumpling Gang than Napoleon Dynamite in complexion; another errant That’s Incredible Cinema programme, home to three boneheaded horror movies (The Lost and Them aside, The Signal’s first third outdoes The Invasion at any rate), two addictive flights in juvenilia (Death Note and Aachi & Ssipak, the latter a bastard blend of rectal satire and Temple of Doom homage), and Taxidermia, one nauseous, nefarious freak show peddling Hungarian degeneration that’s a million miles from Mathew Barney and Bela Tarr. A one-time-only offer, Killer of Sheep was even better with Charles Burnett in attendance (the tear-in-the-pants footnote a great anecdote); seemingly under-attended, the seventies retrospective confirmed people still need convincing of how a theatrical presentation can reconstitute the experience of films like The Hired Hand and The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich’s masterpiece still remarkable as a bridge between the Old Hollywood and New); and also worthy of greater visibility, the festival’s always interesting experimental section – this year including the works of Leighton Pierce, Danny Williams, and live in Auckland, Metamkine.


One last observation: as viewing fluctuated between the rank and the rarefied, the phenomenon of festival-going singles was nothing if not consistent, even surging as more closet cinephiles unchained themselves from the stigma of watching alone. Movies, ordinarily a social outing to the casual and carefree – and particularly so in a country that lacks a conspicuous film culture – grow a different skin under the incubation of this festival every winter, and for two weeks, no longer are they the occupied territory of couples and orchestrated gatherings. The introduction of a long-overdue concession ticket boosted walk-up attendance no doubt, and there’s something to be said for sitting in a theatre that’s equally dispersed rather than clustered with incessantly chatty groups. Plus, I can’t think of anything more painful than having to discuss the latest David Lynch film immediately after its conclusion. Inland Empire isn’t conducive of an instantly congealed opinion, and while I know it was the most stimulating thing I saw all festival, chances are I may dislike it as much as I was thrilled by it next time around. Either way, I look forward to seeing it again (it returns briefly to the Paramount in November) – by myself.




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