Last round of IFFR reviews: The Grand Finale or... Aaaaaaah!
Mama might've been my biggest shock surprise of the festival which might've actually beaten out Animal Politico as my favorite of the festival. This is a film that does something extremely rare, which is touch my cold, hateful heart. A Slovenian mother takes her drugs-recovering and estranged daughter to the Italian countryside, where both heal from their suffering. What is truly impressive though is that outside of the opening scene and a scene somewhere in the middle, they never interact. They journey out separately and visit places like a monastery, a beach, a tiny rock island in the midst of a calm river. There is very little dialog, and most of the film consists of them being alone with their thoughts. It is a very poetic movie, in every definition of the word, sometimes even literally with little lines of written poems occasionally appearing on screen that describe the feelings they had before they arrived.
When I cut myself
I can see how disgusting I am
Disgusting and beautiful
I now understand why mother loves flowers
she loves to watch things grow
only her way
As such it's very close to the work of Terrence Malick, and to complete that cypher there's a couple of scenes here, very reminiscent of Tree Of Life's famous Lacrimosa scene, where director Vlado Skafar simply shows the beauty of nature and people, accompanied by absolutely gorgeous modern classical music.
Magnificat.
Hal-Le-Lu-Jah!
By the end I was just completely blown away by this, and this was one of those rare instances where there wasn't an awkward silence before the (often) forced applause, there was a mesmerizing silence of admiration that felt cruel to break by applause. If that's not GOAT, then I don't know what is.
5/5
The Assassin on the other hand might've been my biggest disappointment. Not to say that it's a bad movie, because it's not, it's a good movie, but there seemed to be a clash of styles here between the filmmaking of auteur Hou Hsiao-Hsien and the Wuxia genre that caused the movie to just not mesh really well. The narrative is very straight forward but at the same time delivered strangely convoluted, with action pieces often smash cutted into the events as if Hou deliberately wanted to break from every convention of the genre, and it makes the picture somewhat of a muddled affair. Yet at the core there is still truly strong filmmaking at work alongside strong performances by accomplished actors Shu Qi and Chen Chang. It's not surprising that the movie has thus proven to be both acclaimed but also considered alienating 3.5/5
After finishing film school Pieter-Jan de Pue worked as a photographer in Afghanistan during the war. In 2007 he decided to make a film about the life of a group of children surviving on their own, and eight years later he completed
The Land Of The Enlightened. A mixture of documentary and fiction, it provides a detailed look into the state of the war-ravaged country where young boys rob opium smugglers and trade old tank shells for food, but unfortunately De Pue can never quite find the balance to make it work. The non-actors (children mostly) are constantly looking into the camera, laughing and smiling at their reenactments, and with moments where you can even tell they're being given directions off screen, it makes the whole thing come across as sloppy while there is really no depth to the scenes showing American soldiers on their "hooah!' steez as they bomb mountain ridges. At least due to De Pue's photography background and the extensive time that went into making the film, it looks absolutely beautiful, and paired with its unique look into an otherwise fairly unknown world, at least makes it watchable, but that mostly has to do with the strength of the subject material. 3/5
@Tuaminator
Aaaaaaaah! is a comedy with a retro 70s vibe about life in a small British town where people behave like primates. It is pretty much fukkery personified. It's raunchy, silly, utterly stupid to the point it occasionally becomes clever and all in all just pure madness. Half the audience walked out, half the audience was in tears with laughter but I don't think anybody understood why this movie even exists. I don't understand either, but it is here regardless, it is absolutely insane, and as the closing film of my IFFR experience, I give it a solid 3/5.
Random festival notes:
The Tiger Award was won by
Radio Dreams, but under the new Festival Director the main competition was so incredibly side-tracked almost nobody saw it. I certainly didn't see it, and it was through nothing but pure convenience that I actually saw only one of the Tiger Award competitors myself because I had no idea which movies were in competition. Definitely something that needs to be improved on.
Land Of Mine won both the main audience award and the special jury audience award, which makes that movie the big winner of this year. It's also worth noting the Top 3 of the main audience award were Land Of Mine, The Idol and Room, which emphasizes that although the festival is known for giving a chance to debuting and risk-taking directors, most of its visitors are plebs who strongly favor conventional film making. And that's not saying those are bad movies, but it really reminds me why I'm generally turned off by these audiences filled with wannabe-film connoisseurs.
shytty-ass
The Plague At The Karatas Village actually won an award as well, the NETPAC Award (Network for Promotion of Asian Cinemas) for best Asian production selected by a special jury. Which just goes to remind you that sometimes even professional juries don't know shyt.
