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October 11, 2009
VIFF part two: Doppelgangers and double-bills.
by Peter T. Chattaway
One of the fun things about going to a film festival is the way certain patterns begin to emerge, however accidentally. The most striking example of this here in Vancouver in recent years might have been at the 2003 festival, when documentaries like
Dying at Grace and fictitious films like
The Event,
My Life without Me and
The Barbarian Invasions (which went on to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film) all dealt with
death, terminal illness and/or assisted suicide.
No such festival-wide patterns have emerged this year, as far as I can tell, but it's still possible to see even two films close together that make you go, "Hmmm."
My first day at this year's festival, for example, included a pair of films that mixed old and new sensibilities in interesting ways. First there was
Bluebeard (October 1, 9, 11), a retelling of the
classic French tale about a young woman from a poor family who marries a somewhat ugly member of the nobility, discovers he isn't quite as hideous or terrifying as his reputation suggests, but then makes a fateful decision when he gives her some keys to the chateau and tells her she is free to use all of them but one. The tale is juxtaposed with modern-day scenes in which two young girls crawl around an attic, discover a copy of
Bluebeard, and read it together -- and while the "classic" scenes have a certain rustic make-believe quality, reminiscent of the Appalachian folk-tale films made by
Tom Davenport in the 1980s, the "modern" scenes have more of a kids-say-the-darnedest-things quality, as the girls argue over the meaning of romance and marriage. Director Catherine Breillat has made a number of shocking, sexually explicit films over the years (one of which,
Fat Girl, was briefly banned in Ontario several years ago), but her newest film is remarkably tame; that being said, it still has a few scenes of blood and death, some of which will be familiar to those who know the
Bluebeard story and some of which will not. In short, then, while parts of this film may be
about children on some level, it is definitely not
for children.
Immediately after seeing that film, I caught
Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl (October 1, 6, 14), a short feature (only 64 minutes) directed by the 100-year-old Portuguese filmmaker
Manoel de Oliveira. That's right, the director is one full century old -- almost as old as cinema itself! -- and it's fascinating to see him put new techniques to the service of a story that is, in some ways, very old-fashioned. The story concerns a man who looks out his office window one day, sees a woman holding a fan, and is immediately smitten; before long, he and the woman are talking about marriage and, after his uncle fires him, the man goes looking for a job that would give him the kind of income that would make marriage possible. There is something charmingly "archaic", as
David Bordwell puts it, about the courtship on display here, but the film also makes occasional nods towards the current economic woes affecting our planet. The film is also shot, and exquisitely so, in digital video, a format no one could have even dreamed of when de Oliveira made his first movie back in 1931. So there is a subtle mix of old and new styles here that keeps things interesting.
Another virtual double-bill that could be interesting, though I didn't actually see these films at the same time, might be one based on
Empire State Building Murders (October 3, 14) and
Double Take (October 4, 6). Both films mix brand-new footage with footage from classic Hollywood films, ostensibly to serve some sort of bigger theme, and if you're in the mood for something experimental, these films might well do the trick.
Empire State Building Murders in particular has quite a bit of potential, or so you'd think, because, in addition to creating a brand-new story out of its re-mixed footage, it features brand-new interviews with Mickey Rooney, Cyd Charisse and others, all appearing "in character" as the elderly versions of the various gangsters and molls who appear in the composite story, which is set in the 1930s and 1940s. (Kirk Douglas appears too, but never speaks, presumably because of the stroke he had in 1996; his character's thoughts are expressed by someone else in voice-over.) Alas, the resulting movie feels awfully prosaic; the story feels as convoluted as you would expect from a movie that has to squeeze so many disparate elements together, and if there was any larger point to be made by all of this editing, I missed it.
I was more intrigued by Double Take, which mingles the films and TV episodes produced by Alfred Hitchcock with archival Cold War footage and clips from an interview with a Hitchcock impersonator, among other things. If Empire State Building Murders is prose, then Double Take is poetry -- which is to say, it doesn't follow a conventional narrative, as such, and I can sense something deeper going on here than a movie-clip mash-up, but it would take me more than a single viewing to say just what that deeper theme is. For now, though, I can say I was fascinated by the juxtaposition of real and fictitious footage -- it's always good to remember that ominous, even apocalyptic movies like The Birds were being made right around the same time as the Cuban Missile Crisis -- and I am intrigued by the film's emphasis on "doubles" and the perceived dangers posed by them, and how this ties into the film's depiction of the relationship between the two superpowers in the decades following World War II. The old ads for Folger's coffee are also something to behold.
That's it for now; more later.
