Julia Gillard, Sigourney Weaver, Jean Harlow

Australia has a new Prime Minister: Julia Gillard. Not elected, mind you, but an important first that must be celebrated in its firstness. And by that I mean, Charles Sanders Peirce’s firstness, a kind of mode of being without reference to object or subject. This is mainly me shying away from da politix, bro. I’ll leave that for the back of toilet doors and on the side of scaffolds.

However, we (the royal I?) mustn’t shy away from an unavoidable, incontrovertible fact of PM Gillard’s mode of being: she’s a deadset ranga. While this may be evidence enough for some of what lies beneath, the mauling mongrel, I prefer to take my evidence from an ABC “100 Best Movies of all Time” television broadcast in which she appeared a few years ago. I think The Lord of the Rings topped that poll—yes, I know, like, totes whatevs—but I remember the then Deputy PM, possibly even opposition spokesman on workplace relations, was asked for her favourite film character. She said something like, “I reckon being Sigourney Weaver in those Aliens movies would be alright.”

The ideal ego of my Prime Minister is Ripley, and that’s alright by me. I imagine she’s thinking of the infamous scene at the end of Aliens, when Ripley has entered into the mechanical body of an industrial robot and whisper-shouts, “Get away from her you, bitch” to the motherfucking queen alien, who’s already got all up in her face and shit-talked via her tongue-teeth xenonculus (excuse nonsensical neologism: “homunculus” just doesn’t work, and “alienculus” sounds like a link you might not want to click).

By identifying with Weaver, Gillard manages to tick some important re-election boxes:

(1) She stands up to The Company and their exploitation of nature’s commodities, whose raw, what I’ve previously called evolutionary perfection will be refined for intense profits by the military-industrial complex. Look out Big Mining.

(2) By using the robot, she not-quite-commits industrial sabotage (though blowing the whole operation up is always top of Ripley’s To Do list), but at least draws on the product of a no doubt heavily unionised manufacturing industry—Jules won’t forget where she came from.

(3) Finally, she performs this act of heroism in the name of Newt. Like Gillard, Ripley has no children of her own and is not married. However, the mother within, that essential component in the popular and populist punditry of what comprises women, emerges at the right time. By calling the queen a bitch at this moment, she recognises a shared femininity based in progeny and its protection. If some moron impersonates Mrs Lovejoy and brings up Gillard’s childlessness in reference to some failing or some inability to empathise with some rubbish point of view, they need to be silenced by that final scene in Aliens. And be used to host an alien. See how much they like babies then.

Jean Harlow: Red-Headed Woman (1932). Our Julia wouldn’t take this kind of treatment.

Sydney Film Festival VI :: Apart Together: From Eternity to Her

I met a Taiwanese philosopher last year. For real. He asked me a lot of questions about Australia (“Where are your Aborigines?”) and gave me his take on the difference between “Asian man and European man.” You see, he told me, when an Asian man drinks, he gets furious and wants to fight everybody. A European man just drinks and drinks until he falls down, and he will later die early from brain damage.

In Quanan Wang’s Apart Together, we get a great scene of a Chinese man getting drunk and getting furious and wanting to fight everybody. It happens around midway through the film, where Lu Shenmin (Xu Caigen) finally drops his unflappable accommodating and lets loose on the unusual situation. Shenmin’s wife, Qiao Yu-e (Lisa Lu) has received a letter from her long lost lover, Liu Yansheng (Ling Feng). He fled for Taiwan in the final days of the Kuomintang in Shanghai in 1949. He married during his exile, his wife’s now dead, and he’s coming back to Shanghai for the first time in fifty years.

His arrival is touted in a deadpan scene, where Yu-e’s granddaughter reads the letter aloud over a meal of soup, slurping her way through a monotone delivery. The abandoned son is there, Yu-e’s husband, their kids, everyone. What does he want? He wants her, she wants him, Shenmin gives it all his blessing. Incongruity is the film’s dramatic motor, a social comedy cum odd divorce farce.

I remember having to get a visa to go from one terminal in Beijing airport to the other; imagine the difficulty Shenmin and Yu-e encounter when they attempt to get a divorce, only to discover that they’re not considered married because they cannot produce the right papers. And so these common-law partners go to another room in the bureaucratic building to get married, so they can go back to get a divorce. (Need I mention I was reading Kafka during my transit?) This scene is built for obvious comedy, but Shenmin’s smile in the obligatory wedding photo is pure genius.

(Lisa Lu, looking nothing like her character. She doesn't smile like this for her photo.)

Wang knows that he has acting gold in his three elderly leads. Lisa Lu, Ling Feng, and Xu Caigen have all had half-century long careers in films, and it’s a total pleasure to watch them hit their marks with a tilt of the head, a lingering look, and, in the film’s best scene, singing over drinks. Ling Feng, spry and brown, plays off Lisa Lu’s still determination, offering possibilities that she has the power to follow or reject.

But Xu Caigen (on the left, below) is my boy: Talk of his strong appetite, buying the big crabs for their faraway visitor, soaking his feet in hot water, and, w/r/t/ the scene I began with, lashing out against his current situation and his needlessly penny-pinching path to get there, he completely steals the film. A Chinese student told me his name wouldn’t be recognised by many, but his face would, as he has played supporting roles in over fifty films. He’s hilarious, arresting, deferential, explosive. Like I said, he’s my boy.

Of course, this film is a parable about new China. Numerous skyscrapers exceed the frame, there is the metonymic tension of Taiwan v the mainland, visitors go on a tour of Shanghai where significant buildings are compared to international counterparts (the Sydney Harbour Bridge gets a guernsey), and a granddaughter’s fiancé is heading to America to study. But this is all handled in a muted way—if this is a necessary condition of Chinese film production I don’t know.

I’ve been told you can get underground films in Chinese bars that take on government dogma. If you can’t already tell from my appeals to anecdotal orientalism, I know little about mainland Chinese cinema, other than the big films of the last 20 or so years. I know they break their cinema up into generations, but I couldn’t tell you what number they’re up to. I’d guess 8^th. I do know this film won the Golden Bear at Berlin, where there must have been some resonance of a nation or a people internally and arbitrarily divided. But for me, this film’s significance comes from observing consummate cinematographic performance. And this all about what’s taking place in a room, not beyond its walls.

Screen memories: “ohhing" at a bus tour guide’s drone; a banquet drowning in the rain; the wedding photo

I think this song is sung in the great drinking scene:

Sydney Film Festival V :: The Sentimental Engine Slayer: "You found your doppelganger--congratulations."

Pop quiz: your boss (at right) at work is a big man. He starts telling you a story in a private back room after he’s showed off a big pistol. You’ve been having trouble getting laid, and his story of going to solicit a prostitute sounds like a sympathetic entrée. Then: “This girl was a man. I mean hairy balls and everything.” What do you do now? Silence, right? But your boss goes on, “No-one was around, so I said, ‘Fuck it.’ I fucked that shit like I was Jesus. And that shit felt goooood.” Pull back, the gun is under your chin. Yes, you agree to it being a secret, just between you and him. What you probably wouldn’t do is try to replicate this adventure.

This marks a turning point in The Sentimental Engine Slayer, and a welcome one. After wallowing in oblique narration and odd shot durations, the image-threads, colours, and icky, charged looks form a broken machine of the fantastic. This (kinda) makes it okay for the way the digital image doesn't always resolve itself, casting black lines that resurface the image.

The editing proceeds like the songs of The Mars Volta: crazy fast, uncertainty and risk coming from not knowing what is going on and long takes, where the danger comes from not finishing in time, from the variations and open-endedness. The band’s music, at its best, draws on rhythmic complexity. These may be frenetic, determining the lyric and melody, or they may develop from the searching spaces created by Omar Rodríguez-López, the band’s guitarist and chief songwriter, and, as credited at the start of The Sentimental Engine Slayer, writer, producer, and director of the film. He also plays the lead the character. He scores the film, naturlich.

Saturated in Mexican Technicolor Catholicism and a baking El Paso, one of the most visually interesting films in the Festival is surprisingly underwhelming for its sound. There are some fantastic passages of white noise, but volume is the main aural dynamic—the different channels are not employed.

But this does change after the introduction of the trans. Reality and fantasy become one – the psychiatrist is papa, sister is in your bed, man is a hot, available woman, you slay with impunity, your model car becomes the real deal.

López is all confidence and control on stage; here, despite being over 30, he manages to convincingly portray a geeky teenager (which I suppose is what he still is, producing album after album and involved in tons of musical projects). What works against him is his eyes: squinty and sunken, you probably see them for 15 seconds across the course of the film. This does not make for an engaging central character, which, while not fatal, makes it difficult to watch an already discordant film that is nonetheless relying on the urge to resolve narrative puzzles.

Screen memories: opiate skin poppers; bloody bathroom; the glance before shutting a door; Barlam’s arbitrary choking attacks

Sydney Film Festival IV :: The Tree: Kick It Root Down

Charlotte Gainsbourg stars in this French and Australian co-production set in Queensland. Her character, Dawn, explains the unlikely presence of a Frenchie with a Britishy accent in the small town, but they needn’t have bothered – we all know Gainsbourg is reason enough. It’s difficult not to resist this film, probably the one I’m least enthusiastic about of the 10 or so SFF films I’ve seen. A dead father’s spirit or soul or whatever living in a big-arse Moreton Bay Fig? It’s adapted from Julie Pascoe’s Our Father Who Art in the Tree, a book’s whose title makes me feel vomity. I hated The Riddle of the Trumpalar as a kid, and approach most human-tree associations with extreme caution.

Each of the four kids is affected in their own way by the death of their father. I couldn’t help but feel that the precocious Simone (a nuanced performance by Morgana Davies), whose save-the-tree-for/its-my-dad was an image of a real thornily-named girl who lost who her dedicated, Queenslander father, and her mute, strangely-behaving, blonde bobbed younger brother only drove home this association. This is probably just me.

The tree threatens the house, its roots messing up the plumbing, and a large branch crashes through Dawn’s bedroom. A wrathful wraith of the husband unappreciative of her nascent amour with the rugged, nice-as, successful local plumber? Better than this possibility is Dawn curling up with the branch, a human-tree coupling I can absurdly appreciate.

“That’s not a tree, it’s an octopus,” says the bitchy old duck next door. The shade of guilt follows the family to the plumber’s caravan by the beach. A thousand-tentacled jellyfish redoubles the neighbour’s image, and it spurts out a dozen or so fish. It scares Simone. Dawn similarly gets scared by a bat coming in to hang off her light fixture.

The film began with images of great potential. The soon-to-be-dead dad works as a truckie transporting entire homes through the outback. Very wide load indeed. There are great shots of these floating abodes, moving like land-boats through a parched oceanic outback. Foucault took boats as images of heterotopias, and said “In civilisation without boats, dreams dry up.” But it’s already dry out here, and all a coming cyclone can do is cause the film to run its course.

However, while these places without a place disappear from the film, they go underground, and root the temporality of a game Simone and her friend play: “I’m 15, I’m still top of the class, which is boring, and I have three boyfriends; I’m 18, and I’ve moved to Paris, I work in a bar, and I say, ‘Bonjour, Je m’appelle Simone.’” The girls invent scenarios, imagined futures, the slices of time Foucault called heterochronies. Here, Foucault’s exemplary figures are cemeteries, which “begin with … the loss of life, and with this quasi-eternity in which her permanent lot is dissolution and disappearance.” This exactly describes the trajectory Dawn follows after the death of her husband, a kind of subterranean undoing always riddling the foundations of the family, and especially so long as they stay in The Tree.

Screen memories: cutest bat ever wrapping himself in his wing-cape; Gainsbourg sleeping with a tree; Bob, I mean Charlie, farting in the bath; jellyfish spawning fish.

Sydney Film Festival III :: Life During Wartime: Forgive, Forget, I'm Still Wet

This was one of the films I was really looking forward to. Todd Solondz’s Happiness is close to a peerless film, and its sequel must be greeted with interest. More of the same? Yes, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing when the source is so good.

It’s 10 or so years on and almost everyone is living in Florida. The film begins with close to its best scene, a repeat of Happiness’s opening of Joy and a boyfriend in a restaurant. She’s married to Allen (Michael K. Williams from The Wire and, lest we forget, R. Kelly’s totally peerless hip-hopera Trapped in the Closet), a reformed criminal she met in her rehab work with prison inmates. Every day it’s a struggle: “The crack. The cocaine. The crack cocaine….” He’s got it all under control except for the dirty phone calls to strangers, as a waitress spitting in his face reveals. That’s right, Phillip Seymour Hoffman has become Michael K. Williams. (I admit, I didn’t click to this immediately – I thought the dirty phone calls were but an awkward remnant of “Hoffman’s character.”)

None of the original actors reprise their roles. And that makes sense: Happiness ends with the revelation that Bill Maplewood, your father, husband, son-in-law, brother-in-law, psychiatrist and all round family guy is a child rapist. That would change you.

Allison Janney, playing the wife of Bill, is a Solondz natural, with her tragicomic face. She’s told her youngest children that their father died. Billy is off to college, and so the probing pubescent is left to Timmy, his younger brother. When Trish reveals maybe a bit too much about her new beau – “He just touched my elbow and I got wet” – Timmy wonders, “Are you still wet?” And we just know it’s going to end badly when this new guy tries to give Timmy a hug.

Paul Reubens (yes, Pee Wee Herman and public wanker) is too much fun to watch as the ghost or hallucination of Jon Lovitz, amorously appearing to Joy. A figment of Joy’s imagination and guilt – he killed himself after Joy broke up with him – here he’s the response to the moans of her sister fucking Keanu Reeves. Why didn’t Keanu put in some face time? It’d would have been so much better for him to say, rather than just have it reported, that he’s sick of being treated as dumb, and to have him at Timmy’s bar mitzvah would have pretty much made my month.

Turning the boyish Dylan Baker into Ciarán Hinds is a good move. While I’m sure the Irish actor is Catholic, he carries over a badass Jewishness from his role in Spielberg’s Munich. Gaol has hardened him. He talks little, stares out the world. He goes to find Billy to see if he’s like him. He memorably interacts with Charlotte “I am a monster” Rampling, parrying, sexing, thieving.

There is a striking image of a saturated Puerto Rican (read Floridan) villa complex garden, in a sharp deep focus, which alights upon a smudged figure. This figure slowly resolves into perceptibility across its repetition. It’s Timmy, the objet petit a of the paedophile’s visage, the Child of the Real, the obdurate stain that binds the world to his perception of it. Bill admits that the therapy and the drugs don’t help. Back in the day he promised Billy he’d jerk off to avoid doing what he’d really want to do to him; he doesn’t know Timmy as his son, it’s been a long time between tuna sandwiches. Solondz doesn’t directly explore this, perhaps accounting for this particular progression of image.

The wartime stuff? Meh: Bush is bad, the terrorists are like us, are paedophiles terrorists? being buried in Israel, can we “forgive and forget”? None of this matters, for as one of the new characters (“I’ve accepted that no-one finds my work interesting and I’m happy to live a subsistence life with low overheads”) says, China will soon rule the world.

Screen memories: paedophile’s objet petit a, Reubens cursing, not seeing Keanu, Rampling looking like an Afghan hound

You have to watch this:

Sydney Film Festival II :: Le Refuge: Mousse is delicious even if it's Paul's

I’m in love with a pregnant junkie. Well, maybe I’m in love with a projected self, because I think I want to be this pregnant junkie. Sure, her boyfriend dies after an overdose (note to self: wake up and have a short black, not a shot of smack to the neck), and she’s in a coma for six hours, but she wakes up to what is possibly le plus beau médecin in celluloid history, gets only slightly, snidely berated by the dead boyfriend’s mother (but who gives a shit, ’cos you’re smashing her Jack Daniels anyway), then turns up in the eponymous villa sur la plage. This she gets by way of a guy she slept with when she was 16. And thinks he’s her dad. And he’s blind. But we don’t see him. I guess we’re blind too.

Have I mentioned the pregnant junkie’s name is Mousse?

Actually, losing a boyfriend sounds terrible. Wait, here comes his much more handsome brother now. Man, he is brown. In a great scene when Mousse and the brother, Paul (Louis-Ronan Choisy), go the beach, he says, “I’m a sun worshipper.” The camera worships him too. In shots reminiscent of Australian photographer’s Max Dupain’s famous Sunbaker, Mousse and the camera lingers on Paul’s bare body, violating that consensual negative hallucination that exists amongst friends at the beach: not seeing what is there.

François Ozon crafts a melodrama with unconventional characters occupying familiar relational positions, much like his Swimming Pool (2003). It’s not age that provides the welcome frisson here, but Paul’s homosexuality. This spins the scene: Serge, a man who we think is kind of a lapdog obedient to the alluring Mousse, hooks up with Paul. The inevitability of Mousse and Paul getting together, in some way, is detoured, a ballad which we follow not really knowing the outcome.

Music is used in a meaningful way, too. Unlike Knocked Up, where pregnant women are turned away, Le Refuge contains a club in which Mousse can wave her hands in the air, and not care, if just for a while. Not hearing the wise words of the song playing – “We don’t need anyone to feel alone” – Mousse’s high is deflated when she comes across Serge and Paul making out. There is also the constant refrain of the movie’s theme, tinkled by Paul on the piano, and sung by both at some stage.

I’ve not mentioned Isabella Carré who plays Mousse. She possesses “the handsome, but compressed and even cruel mouth” Dickens ascribes to Miss Wade in Little Dorrit, and deploys it artfully. She is in almost every shot, and the film rides her performance. Almost certainly actually pregnant, she uses then doesn’t use her body in a sophisticated way. It is the focus of a crazy woman at the beach who beseeches her, on her knees, to give and give and give. It is the initial focus of a man who boldly approaches her in a café – he digs pregnant chics. This is nicely complicated when she asks him to rock her, prefiguring the baby to come, and remembering the foetal embrace of Mousse and her boyfriend when they got high at the start of the film. Her look to camera at the end of the film, daring us to judge, can only be cut arbitrarily.

Screen memories: the chimp’s face of nipples and stomach that emerges when Mousse is in the bath; the freely floating dome in the milky bath water; split images of Mousse; Mousse.

Sydney Film Festival I :: Near Dark, Not Quite There, But Still, Here

Near Dark seems to be a straight out serial killer—vampire allegory inflected by the Western. Bill Paxton, luxuriating in his role as Severin, the most outré member of the film’s not blood-related yet blood-related “family,” performs the serial artistry of murder-for-murder’s sake. His razor-sharp spurs, delight in getting shot, and caricature of the smooth Cowboy prowling for girls, provides the enjoyment of sexualised violence required by (vampire) flicks. When Caleb Colton (Adrian Pasdar, that jerk who can fly in Heroes) is seduced into the brood by Mae (Jenny Wright), he fights the urge to give into his infected instincts to kill and feed on humans: Stockholm Syndrome as auto-immune disease. However, he is happy to suck wrist with Mae, whose use here, as well as her muted speech, sandy hair, and vehicular drift delimited by men, recalls Barbara Loden’s amazing 1971 wander through Pennsylvania, Wanda. Like Loden’s lead, Mae doesn’t say much – she’s too busy “listening to the night.” And instead of the synthscape of Tangerine Dream's score, the night apparently sounds like a murmurous cinema crowd. (And it wasn’t the real crowd, who were rather reverential and clapped at the end of the film. Note: a sample size of two indicates applause will occur 100% of the time during the Sydney Film Festival.)

The film is superficially notable for reteaming Aliens cast Paxton, Lance Henrikson, and Jenette Goldstein. Near Dark was the next film for all three. Bishop now leads the team, Vasquez has gotten a sweet white bouffant, and Hudson is still a dickhead. Their stalking enemy is no longer the evolutionary perfection that is Alien, but the eternal return of the same, that goddamn Dawn. In a cute reversal of a fire blanket’s usual function, the vampires wrap themselves in bedding to block out the sun if they find themselves out in the day, which they do a lot (mainly the new guy’s fault). But, after exposure, their bodies soon begin smoking, catch fire, and explode. The Cancer Council should use this footage in a campaign against sunbeds.

But Near Dark’s major reason for rescreening, and probably why it was the first film shown in the Sydney Film Festival’s Vampire retrospective, is that it was directed by Kathryn Bigelow, she of the Oscar-winning divorcee melodrama The Hurt Locker. Her male lead in this event was James Cameron, from whom she borrows the Aliens cast and thanks with a “A L I E N S Now Playing” ad in the background of one shot.

Anything doing in Bigelow’s first solo feature? Well, there’s the hillbilly western element. While American vampires tend to spend most of their time drawing on and adding to the Southern Gothic archive, these vampires roam through Oklahoma; Waco is verbally marked as the furthest point in “the wrong direction.” Shot mainly in Arizona, the film would seem to traverse the Texan and Oklahoman panhandles. Are the vampires a band of outsiders, wreaking their unholy family on the conservative future wind-farmers? Jesse said he fought for the South. “We lost,” he elaborates. OK, so are they endemic, a disease of the blood in a closed population? That a blood transfusion provided by Caleb’s veterinarian father cures him of his “sickness,” indicates that we might lean toward the latter.

Might there be something interesting in the image? No doubt, there are beautiful, striking shots: the camera tracks the shadow of a stricken Caleb, tracing his Golem - doppelganger as mise-en-scene; telephoto gazes on moon and sun rapidly passing behind clouds provide diegetic wipes that signal the strict diurnal structure of their life; and, many a mauve and peach sky meets a faraway horizon, driving a pyramid of depth into the image. We can say there’s Bigelow’s obvious gifts for arranging space and shooting action with a strong, geometrical logic, u.s.w. - especially the shootout in the motel room, where bullet holes are more deadly than bullets, beams of light piercing the dark interior - but we needn’t, because, unlike the unfortunate Ms Loden who directed but a single, astounding film, Ms Bigelow could get better over her next seven.

Screen memories: montage of pounding, insistent oil drill as Caleb feeds on Mae’s wrist; close-up of charred hands on fire gripping a steering wheel; Caleb’s smoking body wending through a ploughed field.