When I attended the International Film Festival Rotterdam earlier this year, I was struck by the festival’s efforts to cut its slate, having gone from 575 films in its last pre-pandemic edition to 424 (split almost evenly between features and shorts). The Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF, after its Estonian name, for short) is moving in the opposite direction, its 249 features and 323 shorts building on last year’s already expansive 236 features and 240 shorts (for comparison, Sundance has held steady at roughly 80 features and 60 shorts). Such large slates allow a festival a high enough share of world premieres to garner A-list accreditation from FIAPF, which in turn makes a festival slot more appealing to filmmakers and producers, but they are a bit harder on audiences, who can face the same option paralysis that infects streamers. They are even tougher on critics, for whom exploring enormous slates with mostly unknown filmmakers and little industry hype can feel like shooting craps and hoping for the dice to get hot.
Critics unwilling to try their luck absent received notions about films’ quality, popularity, or value are in the wrong profession (or lifestyle hobby, more likely). The idea that all of the best films being made around the world are being picked up for distribution, or even playing the highest profile festivals, is a convenient fiction, and critics have a responsibility to dispel it. But watching your elevens and sevens come up sixes and nines can be discouraging. That’s easier said than done: there are only so many column inches in the English language film criticism world (or, for online publications, only so much attention that can be harvested), and publishers are hardly in a financial position to divert resources, from, say, Cannes to PÖFF. Still, cinephilia in which critics are unable and unwilling to partake in genuine discovery is unhealthy cinephilia. It’s a responsibility for those of us who can to roll the dice, even if they run cold.
Although you are reading this after the festival has ended, I flagged as highlights before the awards ceremony three films honored in their sections with a best director award. The first of these, the First Feature competition’s Yard of Jackals, I was compelled to watch after spending part of my first night rapt in conversation with director Diego Figueroa about Killers of the Flower Moon and Christopher Nolan (I share this story both in the interest of full disclosure and because — directors take note! — a festival critic is always looking for a hint about what to prioritize, and a director who can talk shop is as strong a hint as any). Ostensibly a thriller about a model maker whose curiosity gets the best of him when he begins to hear DINA agents torturing dissidents next door, A Yard of Jackals is really a double-layered identity game. There is a small mystery at its narrative core, but a bigger one in its formal structure, which includes occasional shots of ghostly figures, cutaways to model figurines, and uncanny, suspiciously long closeups on some of the plot’s more enigmatic characters.
Figeuroa is nicely attuned to the details of his scenario as well as his formal conceit, giving his shots and staging the breathing room to key the astute viewer in on the sorts of character details that (to avoid spoilers) demonstrate that the film is more than the dialogue conveys. If the plotting is a tad conventional and the images not quite strong enough on their own to sustain the the tension the film requires, it gets a big assist from a score by Diego de la Fuente Curaqueo, who told me he took inspiration from Bjork in creating his own instruments so he could get exactly the kinds of sounds he wanted, as well as from noise music. Where the film’s ambitions start to exceed its grasp, the score more than compensates.
Ruiqi Lu took home the same award in the Rebels With a Cause section for what is possibly the festival’s most experimental feature, and one — contra A Yard of Jackals — I stumbled into simply because, of all the film’s playing one particular evening, it had the most interesting synopsis, particularly for its mention of “an iconic character from a seminal film [who] inspires [the protagonist] to go out into the world.” Whatever that made me expect, it was not an ingenious repurposing of Jeanne Dielman, present in an uncanny, unreal Chinese remake (instantly recognizable due to its compositions, the kitchen it takes place in, and even the hairstyle of the Delphine Seyrig stand-in) that the unnamed protagonist projects onto a retractable screen in her abode.
Jeanne Dielman haunts the film’s tableaux — rigid and geometric, but also, per the title, intentionally blurry and underlit — even as Lu film iterates on her scenario (in short, a woman ditches her contact lenses and begins to see the world anew), demonstrating a keen attention to how camera placement can defamiliarize the environs. Lu is also conscious of sound, letting the noises of household appliances and the buzzing of a mosquito fill the soundscape in the dialogue-free first half of the movie, though the aural concept is underbaked compared to the visual one. That’s only a minor problem: If Contact Lens overstays its welcome a bit, it’s because of a fundamental redundancy. Jeanne Dielman already proposed that, once you become aware of your own oppression, revolution is the only option. In Contact Lens, it becomes clear relatively early that the intertwining of the protagonist’s reality with that of the film-within-the-film will enable newfound freedom and self-discovery. Once it does, all that remains is a dutiful march to that conclusion, especially since the central metaphor (and its narrative integration into the film) is a bit muddy, felt more conceptually than dramatically. Still, of all the films I watched at PÖFF, none were so deliberate with each image.
I, The Song, the Critics’ Pick best director winner, was one of the few world premieres I had cause to be excited for ahead of time, as director Dechen Roder also helmed 2016’s underheralded Honeygiver Among the Dogs, which took the signifiers of neo-noir but fashioned a ghost story of the existential dread at the genre’s heart. The premise of her new film — when a pornographic video begins to circulate, schoolteacher Nima is mistaken for Meto, a woman she does not know but to whom she has a remarkable resemblance — is somewhat misleading, as Roder is uninterested in either the lurid details or in litigating the morality of her inciting incident. Instead, she uses Nima’s ensuing quest to find her doppelgänger to linger in Bhutanese locales — empty bars where Meto’s ex plays guitar, a village where Meto has been cryptically tasked with “returning the song,” and more besides — and explore thornier questions of identities personal, cultural, and spiritual.
In these ways, I, The Song somewhat resembles Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell (which also quickly discards its dramatic beginning to embark instead on a spiritual journey), but where Phạm Thiên Ân used duration to emphasize the gravity and difficulty of his protagonist’s journey, Roder’s pacing imbues it with ethnographic flourish. Roder is less interested in how taxing Nima’s journey is than in how it provides opportunities to examine and re-evaluate both urban and traditional Bhutanese life. Her visual acuity is equally subtle, distinguishing the two women through color palettes before slowly uniting them for dramatic effect. Roder’s lack of concern for her plot logistics is clear early on, so it’s hardly a problem that much of the film consists of people pointing Nima from one place to another, as each vignette is essentially an excuse to dive deeper into everything from urbanization and tourism to cultural tradition and spirituality. Let’s hope it doesn’t take Roder another eight years to get her next feature off the ground.
The best of the PÖFF premieres, to these eyes, was another that sidesteps procedural trappings to offer something more contemplative, but one that went home empty-handed: Lithuanian thriller Jōhatsu, directed by documentarian Nerijus Milerius and his former student, Lina Lužytė. From the opening shots, in which a mortician leads a woman down a dark hallway, clicking on lights as she goes, Jōhatsu displays remarkable precision in its sound design. Much of the film takes place outdoors, but we hear little of some sounds we might expect — seagulls, sidewalk chatter, footsteps — while those that remain are amplified. Chief among these are cars and boats, as if suggesting journeys physical and imagined. Indeed, the narrative that unfolds when the mortician, Lina, becomes convinced that the woman intentionally misidentified the body as her deceased husband Vilkas and resolves to track down the “real” Vilkas, is more existential than political or spiritual, and its distinctly psychological bent is conveyed foremost through sound.
That said, Milerius and Lužytė also make the most out of the kind of patient staging common in festival-friendly Eastern European cinema. Rather than falling into a codified European film festival “house style,” they use this aesthetic to build tension that persists well beyond the scene at hand. In an early scene, what looks like another long shot is revealed, but once Lina has finished her conversation, we hear the engine of a car and the camera begins to move, revealing that this was a point-of-view shot the whole time, thereby making all subsequent long shots unusually tense. Later, Lina is pulled into a car by another group looking for Vilkas, and thereafter, every car — and every car sound — in this sparsely populated rendering of Lithuania becomes an object of interest. Craps is a dangerous game, but Jōhatsu shows that, at film festivals, one more roll of the dice can pay off big.
Comments are closed.