Despite the sniffles and the eventual fatigue I enjoyed myself anyway! And I also managed to double the amount of movies I've seen this year in one fell swoop. :)
So here be some quick thoughts.
Stoker (2013, d. Chan-wook Park)
India's (Mia Wasikowska) beloved father dies on her 18th birthday, and in the wake of this tragedy her long-lost uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode) comes home to charm India's barely grieving widow of a mother (Nicole Kidman) and unsettle India.
The creepiness of the film was unnerving at the time of watching but this one really grew on me. While on first watch it seemed to show its hand too early, making Charlie's backstory and his connection with India too obvious and over-the-top; but in all honesty I was surprised by the ending, and the more I think about it, the more the whole movie works for me as a whole, the meticulous construction of mise en scene and plot and atmosphere.
I'd warn that while I've heard it's not as violent as Park's other movies, it's not without its horrors. But it's all so elegantly stylish, taking its gothic elements and drenching them with sunlit days and shadowy nights, and an almost anachronistic opulence in the setting of this amazing, lonely house. Mia Wasikowska is wonderful as always, Nicole Kidman is great too, and as Alison and I discussed afterwards, Matthew Goode continues to work that niche of 'good-looking yet creepy' like a pro.
Blancanieves (2012, d. Pablo Berger)
A Spanish black-and-white retelling of Snow White as a silent film where Carmencita (Sofia Oria, as adult) takes on her dead father's profession as a bullfighter when she runs away after her evil stepmother (Maribel Verdu) schemes to have her killed.
What a great concept! What a beautiful lead actress! What an attractive throwback to old film! And yet - this is slight, so very slight, and maybe a little too faithful to the original fairy tale. Even with its inventions and new locales, it just unfolds without much tension or feeling until an unexpectedly bitter, but tender, ending. And I really liked the ending for diverting from the expected. But the fact it doesn't fit in tone and direction with the rest of the movie just serves to make the rest of it more disappointing.
The Look of Love (2013, d. Michael Winterbottom)
Steve Coogan plays Paul Raymond, the King of Soho" who built an empire starting with the UK's first strip club and popular soft-porn magazines. The film is interesting from a salacious, recent history point of view, with a good eye for the changing fashions and attitudes towards sex throughout time, from the conservative 50s to a high point with the swinging 60s and 70s and then in decline during the bleaker, more hardcore 80s.
But overall it's a bog standard biopic with a fairly loose story arc. The real drama is in the story of his daughter Debbie, a lost little rich girl, groomed to take over for her father, without the steel in his soul, the ability to cut and run. Imogen Poots is really lovely in this role. Actually, all the women are quite interesting in this and the actresses are great - Anna Friel as Raymond's first wife who loses him to other women once his empire starts to grow, and Tamsin Egerton, leggy and gorgeous, as his long-time girlfriend who's a big part of that growing success. But the constant parade of female nudity with more than a dash of tired "ooh-er" naughtiness remains unexamined throughout the film and that gets kind of depressing by the end.
I was really looking forward to this reunion of director Michael Winterbottom and Coogan, but this is the least of their collaborations for me; it could've been so much more.
Stories We Tell (2012, d. Sarah Polley)
It hurts me to say this as a Sarah Polley fan, but this was probably my least favourite of the films I saw at the festival. It's not bad, per se, but it doesn't pull off what it promises - a look at how we tell the stories of our personal histories, how our pasts are shaped by the storytellers, our futures shaped by things of the past.
And the thing is, Polley does have a really interesting story to tell, and comes up with what appears to be an interesting way of telling it through this documentary. She discovers as a teen, after her mother's death, that the man she has always thought of as her father is not her biological dad. But when she goes searching for the man who everyone believes to be her bio father, she accidentally stumbles across an unexpected truth.
The film itself is really ambitious. It layers interviews with her two dads, her siblings and friends of her parents with archival footage of her mother (herself an actress) and a rereading of her father's elegant memoir of the events. There are also re-enactments by actors of stories from their shared family history, embedded as super 8 home movies.
But that's part of its downfall - it appears to reach for too much and doesn't quite know which avenues to explore, how to focus on what it wants to say. Plus Polley is just too close to the subject to be ruthless in paring it back. So in the end, it's more than a little messy and doesn't know where to end. Barely 90 minutes, it really dragged in the last third, when the beats of the film kept making me think/wish it was finishing, but the "story" would keep going, becoming looser and looser with each thread Polley chased.
Dragon Girls (2012, d. Inigo Westmeier)
Probably my favourite film of the festival. I was really moved by this and it resonated a lot with me even as I felt at the same time that I was watching lives so removed from mine. But the film captured and conveyed so strongly a sense of the "idealised Chinese person", this unattainable perfection of body and moxie and nationalism that I recognise from my parents, embedded into their upbringing and values, which has trickled down to me in dribs and drabs.
The documentary focuses particularly on three girls (ages 9 to 16) with somewhat varied experiences of the Shaolin Tagou Kung Fu School in the Henan province of China. The little girls are so great before the camera, often wise beyond their years and able to withstand so much internal and external pressure and hardship; so much so that I did feel somewhat manipulated by the possible clever construction of the story. And yet, I can't get a lot of this movie out of my head, and I really want to find a copy of this to show this to my parents as well to see what they think.
The Bling Ring (2013, d. Sofia Coppola)
A thinly-fictionalised account of the teens who robbed the homes of celebrity Hollywood during a period in 2008-09. This was another very light, sort of formless movie that was easy to watch but ultimately felt very empty.
It's at times really beautiful and striking - the silent robbery at Audrina Patridge's box of a house, filmed from a distance with the lights of Hollywood twinkling in the distance lasted long in my mind after other details about the movie faded. And as you'd expect from Coppola, the film is great at capturing aimless, teenage energy in music and look and mood.
But the thing is, the real story is fascinating, and left me wanting to know more, an itch that went unscratched by this film. I read The Bling Ring - Nancy Jo Sales' book expanded from her Vanity Fair feature on the subject - after seeing the movie and felt it much more satisfied my desire to dig and dig deeper behind these kids and what might have led to them dream up and actually, casually, carelessly go through with this string of robberies.
The thing is, the movie had access to and seemingly works from similar sources of truth so it's inability or unwillingness to say anything made me frustrated the more I thought about it afterwards. It's not helped by some miscasting - Israel Broussard as Marc, our 'everyman' character entrance to the story, Leslie Mann as Nicki's airhead "cool" mom - that even stronger performances (Katie Chang, Emma Watson) couldn't quite save for me.
