Capsule reviews for all the rest of films I’ve seen during this year’s LFF, usually via the Press & Industry Digital Viewing Library.
Apolonia, Apolonia
Apolonia, Apolonia is a portrait of the artist as a young woman. Filmmaker Léa Glob first met Apolonia Sokol as a 21-year-old aspiring painter. Coming from a theatrical family, first respectable then increasingly Bohemian as they fell on hard times, the line between Apolonia’s art and personal life is nonexistent. From her relationship with Oksana Shachko, exiled founder of the Ukrainian movement Femen, to the patronage of Stefan Simchowitz, dubbed the “Art’s World Patron Satan” by the New York Times, this is an intimate, rigorous study of what it means to try to be a creative person in the modern day, battling against self-doubt and forces outside your control.
Asog
A magical-realist, pseudo-documentarian road-trip through typhoon-devastated Philippines, Asog is as scrappy and flamboyant as its protagonist. Jaya (Rey Aclao) is a non-binary drag artist and one-time TV host who now spends their days teaching storm drills to grieving children. Tired of being reliable in a world that’s falling to pieces, Jaya sets off cross-country, despite the protestations of boyfriend Cyrus (Ricky Gacho Jr.), to compete in Ms. Gay Sicogon. In this, they’re accompanied by unassuming former student Arnel (Arnel Pablo), who is billed as co-writer with director Sean Devlin and costar Aclao. Along the way, they encounter a broad swathe of Filipino society – all played by non-actors – who convey the impact that the natural destruction, and the government reaction to it, has had on their lives. Both visually and conceptually inventive – in a flooded studio a sinking video tape unfurls like a rare tropical fish – and enthused with myth and wonder, Asog is a mythic portrayal of solidarity and survival
Birth/Rebirth
There’s no theme as universal as life vs death and perhaps no story as well-known in telling it as Frankenstein. One of at least two films at this year’s LFF to take inspiration from Mary Shelley’s novel1, Birth/Rebirth is meditation on grief and what we can be driven to in the face of unbearable reality. In the aftermath of sudden loss, nurse Celie (Judy Reyes) finds herself thrown together with coroner Rose (Marin Ireland). Two contrasting personalities – Celie, usually warm and sociable; Rose, cool and standoffish – they find themselves with the same goal: to reanimate Celie’s younger daughter. The line blurs between the two women, between scientific endeavor and personal need, as they find themselves driven to desperate measures for the sake of the experiment. Director Laura Moss, who also co-wrote the script with Brendan J. O’Brien, has created a film that, on the surface, is as neat and chilly as the corpses on Rose’s slab, but with an undercurrent of humanity that sometimes goes amiss with more monstrous tellings.
Catching Fire: The Anita Pallenberg Story
Catching Fire: The Anita Pallenberg Story is the rare story of a ’60s star whom I knew next to nothing about going in. Based on a transcript found her death, it’s Pallenberg’s voice, performed by Scarlett Johansson, that guides us through her story: from her childhood in war-torn Europe to her youth as a wild-child of the aristocracy to her time as an “It Girl” posing for Andy Warhol and first encounter with the Rolling Stones – offering them hash backstage at a gig in Germany -and beyond. Pallenberg’s life was glamorous and tragic, and director Alexis Bloom and Svetlana Zill display masterful control of the whirlwind of famous names and talking heads that testify to her brilliance, but the film comes to life in its more mundane aspects; the non-salacious details of relationships that show its subject as more than just a muse or party girl. These scenes are also the most revealing about the men in her life; the still-living ones who continue to her in awe and who she’s invariably more interesting than. Pallenberg describes her story as “a journey through a landscape of dreams and shadows”, but, for me, The Anita Pallenberg Story is at its best when at its most human.
Celluloid Underground
(3 / 5)
As someone who cares a lot about film, Celluloid Underground is a sobering account of what it really to devote yourself to an artform, more specifically its preservation. Documentarian Ehsan Khoshbakht may now reside in leafy Ealing, once home to Alfred Hitchcock, but his passion for cinema was born in Iran. After Islamic Revolution of 1979, showing films became an inherently political act. Khoshbakht accounts how secret police would attend his film club at the University of Tehran. His friendship with and mentorship by an older cinephile, Ahmad Jurghanian, is streaked with tragedy and obsession, as the amassing and preservation of film prints and related materials comes at huge personal cost. The film is similarly streaked with period footage, a sepia ribbon of dream. It’s an esoteric form of activism, but a story worthy of telling and well-fitted to the medium.
Chasing Chasing Amy
We don’t choose the media that resonates with us. In Chasing Chasing Amy, filmmaker Sav Rodgers offers up a deeply personal testimonial on the impact that Kevin Smith’s controversial 1997 rom-com had on their life. Through interviews with of the film’s cast, crew, and members of the LGBTQ+ community, Rodgers explores the importance of representation, what the film gets wrong and, crucially, right. Chasing Amy is a film with a complicated legacy, not least for those who made it, and Rodgers’ documentary engages with it critically and with love.
A Common Sequence
For a film with an urgent environmental messages, A Common Sequence feels less ambitious than meandering. Part essay, part art installation, filmmakers Mary Helena Clark and Mike Gibisser takes us from the dwindling fish supplies of Lake Pátzcuaro in Mexico and monastery-brewed, axolotl syrup to how AI is improving apple picking and how major corporations want to patent Native American genes. Show-not-tell is, of course, a key tenet of filmmaking, but even at 78 minutes, the film feels padded with extended sequences of anatomical diagrams or fishermen at work. In trying to make a grand point about the interconnectedness of nature, A Common Sequence comes across as less than the sum of its parts.
Croma Kid
In Croma Kid, a slight but charming ’90-set Dominican family dramedy, Emi (Bosco Cárdenas) must contend his parents’ obsession with running a cheesy, greenscreen magic show to the detriment of everything else. His waistcoat-wearing dad (David Maler) is a bit of a sad-sack and mum (Nashla Bogaert), who has dreams of being a serious reporter, feels unacknowledged in her struggles. A bizarre equipment sends the plot into sci-fi territory, but the film is at its best when buoyed with the nostalgia of what was then a new frontier of tech wizardry.
Dancing on the Edge of a Volcano
The year is 2020 and a massive explosion has rocked the city of Beirut in Lebanon. Even as the bodies are being recovered and a story begins to emerge of political corruption and incompetence, filmmaker Mounia Akl and her crew must decide whether or not to continue with her debut feature; knowing that if they stop they will likely never resume. Documenting a succession of looming disasters, from missile strikes to a global pandemic, tragedies both national and personal that make the challenges shown in Lost in La Mancha – to which the film is compared – look like a cakewalk by comparison, Dancing on the Edge of the Volcano is a compelling testament to personal endurance and the will to keep creating, even in the face of overwhelming adversity.
Fire Through Dry Grass
Fire Through Dry Grass is the righteously indignant story of The Reality Poets, a group of disabled, minority artists living in a residential care facility in New York, and their harrowing experiences during the Covid-19 lockdowns. Governor Andrew Cuomo may take to the airwaves swearing that the elderly and vulnerable will not be treated as collateral, but as PPE supplies dry up, safety protocols are breached, and deaths go unreported, anger and frustration find vent in self-filmed poetry and animation. Based on what directors Alexis Neophytides and Andres “Jay” Molina – who experienced and survived these events – Cuomo’s administration seem to have spent more time in willful ignorance, during the pandemic, and revising facts afterwards than in putting the fire out. If the current news cycle is anything go by, Cuomo is still feeling the heat of his failure and Fire Through Dry Grass shows a creative will to call him to account.
Molli and Max in the Future
To paraphrase Dolly Parton, it takes a lot of care to look this tacky. Molli and Max in the Future is a love letter to both B-movie sci-fi and to romcoms, specifically When Harry Met Sally. When Molli (Zosia Mamet) and Max (Aristotle Athari) first meet, they do not like each other. Which is understandable, he’s just crashed into her spaceship and doesn’t have insurance. Despite initial reservations, they become friends, then fall out of contact; only to bump into each other five years later – Molli is now in a polyamorous cult of evil-fighting wizards and Max is a celebrity robot-fighter. These repeated collisions come to define the course of both their lives in a will-they-wont-they pseudo-romance that spans the universe. Written and directed by Michael Lukk Litwak, Molli and Max in the Future is a grab-bag of jokes and concepts with a remarkable hit rate, some amazing retro miniature work and a winningly jazzy score. What holds the film together, though, is its focus on Molli and Max and our investment in their relationship. Silly and insightful, this is indie cinema at its most charming.
That They May Face the Rising Sun
(3 / 5)
That They May Face the Rising Sun is a literary adaptation that puts the literature up front. It’s sometime in the early 1980s, and married couple Joe (Barry Ward), a writer, and Kate (Anna Bederke), a painter, are enjoying a quiet domestic contentment in rural Ireland. Their cottage plays host to an assortment of older gentlemen, seeking company and conversation. Sometimes there are walks in country lanes, long, slow shots full of sheep and bees and gentle piano music, accompanied by poetic voiceover from Joe. A paean to everyday beauty, That They May Face the Rising Sun seeks profundity in the long littleness of life. The film doesn’t always find it, but there’s too much love and gentleness here not to get something from the search.
- Okay, the other is technically based on a novel that takes inspiration from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
