Nordling here.
I always have a weird sense of Catholic guilt when I work Fantastic Fest; if I’m not in a movie I should be writing, and when I’m not writing I should be in a movie. But Fantastic Fest is also about the camaraderie and the pleasures of friendship, and I wind up having the attention span of a fruit fly in a room full of, well, fruit. So I don’t rite as much as I’d like, or give each film the space or time that they’re due.
So, in the end, it’s better to write something than nothing, which results in one of those mish-mash reviews of multiple films that deserve attention. This is one of the most strongly programmed Fantastic Fests I’ve ever attended. There’s literally something for everyone - science fiction, noir, animation, weird existential horror, action – they don’t call this the greatest American genre film festival for nothing. A full-length review for GREEN ROOM is coming, but until then, here are a few films I’ve seen this Fest and my reactions to them.
DANGEROUS MEN
If you’re familiar with Drafthouse Films’ acquisition MIAMI CONNECTION, you’ll understand what the studio was going for when they bought John Rad’s DANGEROUS MEN for release. It’s another case study of when a filmmaker’s ambitions far, far exceed the filmmaker’s inept skills. It took Rad (an Iranian immigrant who wanted to make movies in America) 22 years to finish this movie, and it shows – hilariously, we see vintage 1970s cars drive by in one scene, and in the next, a biker wears a T-shirt advertising some event in 1991. The plot centers around a woman whose fiancé is killed, and so undergoes a quest for revenge against the scumbag men of the world… that is, until it doesn’t, and becomes an entirely different movie in the third act.
There are charms and laughs to be had, for sure, but unlike MIAMI CONNECTION, I couldn’t sense much heart in it. As badly made as MIAMI CONNECTION is, at least those guys had good intentions. The film’s ridiculous and over-the-top, but it means well. DANGEROUS MEN is never that earnest. John Rad (whose name is all over the movie, including the soundtrack – the opening credits are delightfully full of his name and his name alone) finds a lot of opportunity to show a bit of T&A, and as an editor, Rad is a bit… let’s say unfocused, but I never felt the sense that he thought he was making something true and real.
MIAMI CONNECTION is a movie that I’ll happily return to because of this. As silly as it is, I feel an odd kinship with those filmmakers. Not so with DANGEROUS MEN. I’m sure it will do well with that crowd, but I’ll never return to it, not in the manner I will with MIAMI CONNECTION, sitting back with a beer and celebrating the sheer love of creating, even if it’s badly done.
CAMINO
There is so much good stuff in CAMINO that it makes it terribly frustrating to have to write about the bad. The good: Zoe Bell and Nacho Vigalondo give top-notch performances in this chase film about an award-winning photographer, Avery (Bell) who goes to Colombia and takes a picture she shouldn’t, which causes Guillermo (Vigalondo) and his squad to go after her in the jungle. The character building is quite rich in CAMINO, surprising for a movie like this, and Bell takes a different tack from her normal action work to play someone vulnerable and perhaps not as skilled at survival as we know Bell to be normally. There is tragedy in her life, and as she struggles to work through that and survive, she does some of the best acting she’s ever done.
Nacho Vigalondo turns in such a terrific, villainous performance that you find yourself rooting for him – Guillermo is convinced that even as he does horrible things, that he is noble, and righteous, even as he condones his own brutality. He’s wonderful to watch. Now, Nacho’s a staple of Fantastic Fest. He’s well-loved here, so you can take that as a disclaimer if you like. But he really is terrific in this, and I hope, if nothing else, people see CAMINO for the acting work from both him and Bell alone.
It’s too bad that everything else about CAMINO falls flat – the cacophonic score that tries to build tension but instead is just loud, or the cinematography at night that made it difficult to see anything at all, which is a shame because a lot of the action is very well-orchestrated. Each member of the squad has a significant backstory that gets us invested, but director Josh Waller and cinematographer Noah Greenberg undercut their material with shakycam work full of ersatz intensity. The use of a natural lighting aesthetic is admirable, but the night sequences were impossible to see. There’s a good movie inside CAMINO trying to escape, and the film’s performances and accentuation on character are commendable. But it could have been so much better.
HIGH-RISE
To be frank, Ben Wheatley has never been a filmmaker I’ve embraced. His worldview is bleak and unrelenting, and I’ve felt that he took joy in fiddling while the rest of the world burns down. I no longer feel that way – I don’t know the man personally, but HIGH-RISE seems to make evident that the only way Wheatley can alert us about a world gleefully diving into the abyss is to laugh at it a little bit. I’m certain Wheatley has read his William Yeats – in HIGH-RISE the center cannot hold, and what others see as nihilism, I see as a warning.
Laing (Tom Hiddleston) is a new resident of a London high-rise with all the amenities one could want – one floor is devoted to a grocery, another to a garden where horses and goats can roam – but as the higher floors and the lower floors snipe and bicker at each other, a power outage causes lines to be drawn. Richard Wilder (Luke Evans) wants to document the abuse of the lower classes, but he’s not above the fray either. All the while, the architect, Royal (Jeremy Irons) tries to keep the higher floors happy and the lower floors in their place. Soon, manners and grace fall and the humanity makes way to animalistic urges and chaos.
Hiddleston is terrific as a man walking the equator between the lower and upper floors. Based on the novel by J. G. Ballard, HIGH-RISE is a study in the dangers of unrestrained capitalism and the class society, and Wheatley fills his movie with remarkable imagery and a 1970s aesthetic that strongly reminded me of Terry Gilliam’s BRAZIL. HIGH-RISE is definitely out of that wheelhouse. The shifts in tone are abrupt – HIGH-RISE goes from 4 to 10 in hardly any time at all. Across the board, performances are excellent – from Evans’ brutal Wilder to Elizabeth Moss’s Helen Wilder (who looks 22 months pregnant, which I’m sure was fully intentional). There isn’t much subtlety in HIGH-RISE; it’s no accident that the architect is named Royal. But that’s the point – HIGH-RISE is in-your-face because it has to be, because we won’t pay attention otherwise, and Ben Wheatley sticks our face in it because it’s just that important that we understand. Like Wheatley’s other films, HIGH-RISE will not be loved by the vast majority who see it, and sadly, those are the people who most need to hear its message.
VICTORIA
A two-and-a-half hour long single-shot German heist movie may seem the height of pretention, but I assure you VICTORIA is not. Sebastian Schipper’s masterful direction keeps everything flowing smoothly, and invests us in characters who we enjoy being around, and even foolish decisions by them keep us riveted. Victoria (Laia Costa) is a barista who, one night, comes across a group of German men led by Sonne (Frederick Lau) and goes partying with them on the streets of Berlin. Victoria and Sonne take to each other, and it’s a testament to the directing and the acting that we believe the relationship – they are young, and the night is theirs, and a charming, romantic moment at a closed café escalates into something more when Boxer (Franz Rogowski) is called upon to suddenly pay a debt to a local gangster. Soon, we are on the run with Victoria and Sonne through the streets of Berlin, and the stunning digital photography by Sturla Brandth Grovlen never wavers from beginning to fateful end.
Like TOO LATE, VICTORIA’s conceit rests on the one-take shot, but unlike TOO LATE, which has edits based on the limitations of 35mm, VICTORIA never lets us blink. According to the filmmakers, there are no phantom edits in VICTORIA, which makes the film even more impressive as it goes on. But the performances are amazing, which is even more compelling than the camerawork – Costa and Lau have a real chemistry together, which is important because we wouldn’t want to follow them otherwise. Victoria makes some decisions that make us as an audience want to reach through the screen and shake her, but we also understand why she does them, and why she is compelled to stay.
I’d be curious to see a map of all the ground covered in VICTORIA – although the movie is almost two and a half hours long, the action doesn’t seem to stray far from central Berlin. I wonder what would have happened if some random piece of traffic held the movie up. The further VICTORIA continues its one shot, the more impressed, technically, it all becomes. VICTORIA is a remarkable movie, thrilling and emotional in all the best ways.
I’ll have more reviews, including GREEN ROOM, as Fantastic Fest concludes in the next few days. I’m trying to keep to the now, and not think of the inevitable conclusion – it really has been an amazing year.
Nordling, out.
