The balance between art and life is more precarious than ever, writes DAVID LEVINSON at the Telecom New Zealand International Film Festivals.


WHAT DOES it say that arguably the two best showings at this year’s TNZIFF – Mitsuo Yanagimachi’s Who’s Camus Anyway? and Hong San-Soo’s A Tale of Cinema – were giant question marks over film’s valency? While Terence Malick and Ken Loach staged swollen (yet sensitive) trips aboard history’s fleet, the two Asian auteurs called apocalypse now on reality’s depletion: Each showed a world where rather than organise lived experience, film increasingly tries to substitute it. What’s great is that these two pagans should show up now, where, for the first time in recent memory, the festival hasn’t run in the shadow of political strife; it seems the only appropriate time where one could ask, once the reel dies and lights stutter into life, “What comes next?”

Hit up Dave Chappelle and the answer’s probably a hangover; his Block Party was a social triumph, lucidly phoning in a NY state-of-mind unscarred by racial faultlines. He was also the closest thing to a festival mascot, and a welcome elixer to the embarrassing safari-hunt of last year’s Rize: For Chappelle, political potency lies in its antonym, the bong-water swirl of mugged charisma and we-don’t-care school spirit. With less light placed on performers – and more on the golden path of promotion –, Chappelle finds genuine agency in his routine, and ensures that even the rapper racist don’t have an excuse for hating.


Without a doubt, hope for solidarity can be a beautiful thing. But in the wrong hands, it becomes a hotplate for playground exclusionary tactics. Take John Cameron Mitchell, whose Shortbus is little more than Sex and the City for heterophobes. Set in a candy Apple as equally cavity-stricken, Mitchell reports that, in the wake of 9/11, repressed Asian chicks are now the enemy, all guys secretly want it in the ass, and having an orgasm is the key to cosmological oneness, duuuude. In other words, an easy excuse for buffering Corey-hotline trauma with graphic sex. But rather than alight the body in all its splendor, Mitchell only reveals it to the point of indifference – like putty smeared too thinly.

For a more concerted take on body politics, you’re better off with Carlos Reygadas’ Battle in Heaven; like Bruno Dumont’s work, the film handles human animalism with majestic austeurity, turning irrational flare-ups of sex and violence into skinsores of an inner malaise. Meanwhile, narrative coherence is traded in for a more environment-based experience. But rather than catalyse the anguish of Reygadas’ stony-faced everyman, the landscape only acts as a barrier, its static daylight, dim inhabitants, and anonymous street facades glimpsed as if through a sedative-haze. Inside this bubble, state and religion fight continuously for control of the reigned body, haemorrhaging into an ending that’s both sublime and totally ridiculous.

If Battle in Heaven flouted all poor expectation, then The Death of Mr Lazarescu may have been the festival’s biggest letdown. Unfolding across the course of a single night, the film charts the physical and mental deterioration of Lazarescu, a 63-year old urgently seeking medical attention. Director Cristi Puiu’s formal control is undeniable; his camera lingers with meditative urgency, reaping from the night the same red-eyed 11th-hour spirituality that claimed Irréversible. But the journey, and its verisimilitude, are severly compromised by his gnarled portrait of the Romanian health system: You’d think Lazarescu was a leper – and not a drunk – given the rising vehemence with which he’s turned down from each successive hospital. As reasoning, many have been quick to throw Kafka at the page, but the film quite never reaches his heights of the willfully absurd.


The American indie scene produced a rich palette of entries this year. Its crowning glory was undoubtedly Bubble, a deadpan appraisal of small-town existence that miraculously manages to skirt the contrived weirdness of David Lynch and piggish condescendion of Michael Moore; Mutual Appreciation surveys Brooklyn’s hipster community with slightly less success, lacking the remove to be anything other than a daguerrotype of Bujalski’s Myspace network. Its inadequacy was further offset by the appearance of grandaddy-o’-slackerdom Richard Linklater, whose A Scanner Darkly quietly betrays his grey roots: More than simply anti-drug, the film links addiction to a nexus of identity-power relations, burnishing its cool veneer with the deeper threat of insanity. Meanwhile, keeping attune to the theme of reality’s mutability, Keane maps the damaged thoughtscape of its title character, a schizophrenic desperately searching for his missing daughter (who may or may not exist). Director Lodge Kerrigan perfectly captures the buzzsaw-dissidence of mental illness, turning the menial litany of stripmalls and fastfood joints into sights of skittering violence.


It comes with no great upset that this was my least attended festival since beginning writing for the site in 2003. As it so happens, Real Life got in the way – yet the end effect of having to partition viewing-time more carefully meant that burnout was avoided, and I didn’t emerge two weeks later feeling like a convict of my desire. It was also the first time that I not just saw, but could feel with certainty how precarious the balance between art and life really is. In truth, the latter sometimes comes across like a frothing animal that has to remain guarded, lest it tear loose and destroy everything. Daniel Tanovic would disagree, though; in L’Enfer, Tragedy is a telescope pointed at the celestial bodies governing human chaos. Then again, he’s probably thinking too big. Life doesn’t overwhelm art; it merely slips out of its hand, too spread and amorphous to ever be retained.

See also:
» Post-Fest Wrap ‘06 #1: Dazed & Confused
» Post-Fest Wrap ‘06 #2: Fuzzy Reception