I can do all of the complaining about celebrity worship and
corporate sponsorship in the world, and believe me, I will; but none of the bad
things that come along with a big film festival can come close to overshadowing
the fact that TIFF is a giant event where thousands of people come together to
celebrate the movies. The thing I’m probably most passionate about. In my day
to day life it would seem impossible to get a bunch of people together and have
them commit to going to see 3 or 4 movies a day, but here, that is the reality.
And people do it enthusiastically. They talk about what they’ve seen; they chat
about what they’re enthusiastic to see next. They compare notes, compare
tastes, and generally just celebrate the art of filmmaking.
From just tooling around on the Internet all day looking to
talk movies, you might get the impression that real film buffs mostly all fall
into the same category of person. That category being slightly socially awkward
white males in their 20s. The biggest thing that going to a film festival
teaches you is that there are people passionately into movies of all shapes and
sizes and from all over the world. In my five days hanging out and watching
movies I struck up conversations with people from all age groups, all shades of
skin color, and from a good number of different countries. And they knew all
the right names, all the good directors, they adored all of the same less than
well-known actors that I did. They spoke the language.
Being a film-obsessed person can be a bit of an isolating
experience. Everybody, if you ask them, will tell you that they love to go to
the movies. But really they don’t mean it. They see, maybe, a movie a month in
theaters. They only watch the biggest releases. They only know the biggest stars.
And forget naming any directors. When you try to show them something art house,
or something foreign, they get bored and leave the room. These people do not
love going to the movies. They love eating popcorn. They love going out on
dates. Finding someone else who is really passionate about all kinds of cinema
is a rare, life-affirming experience, even in this modern age of online
congregation. If you would have told my budding film nerd 12-year-old self that
there was a whole city out there where everyone knew as much about movies and
was as enthusiastic about watching them as he was, he would call you a liar.
Then he would put on his headphones and sulk. TIFF brings that dream to a
reality, even if only for a week or so, and it’s really a special experience.
Let’s break it down this way: I spent five days going to see
a bunch of artsy, indie, or at least off the beaten path movies, and every line
I stood in was full of more hot chicks than any mainstream movie audience I’d
ever been a part of. Here they were, in the hundreds, maybe in the thousands;
hot chicks watching and getting excited about weird, creative pieces of
filmmaking. It’s like a Goddamn dream, and the fact that it took me so many years
to attend my first film festival is now looking pretty absurd. Just five days
hanging out and watching movies, and TIFF has made a fan for life. I’ll see you
again next year, hot film girls. I can’t wait to get back to comparing notes.
My last day of the fest was a little light on films, I tried
to add another Midnight Madness screening at the last minute, because seeing a
late night movie with the most rabid of the rabid film fans was a great
experience and I was disappointed I hadn’t bought tickets to more of them, but
I was short on time and the ticket buyers line was too long. C’est le merde. I
guess there’s always next year. It ended up being a pretty decent day
regardless. I got to see an interesting film from the Philippines called Cuchera, and then I capped off the
festival with Whit Stillman’s long anticipated new project Damsels in Distress, which lived up to people’s expectations, I’m
sure.
Cuchera
Director Joseph Israel Laban’s Cuchera dramatically tackles a topic that he had explored earlier
in documentary form, the pervasive and dangerous drug smuggling practices that
go on in the Philippines. In order to get drugs from country to country,
without being subject to searches and seizures, local drug lords use
down-on-their-luck humans as drug mules to transport the goods. Where do they
carry the drugs? Inside of their bodies. How do they get the drugs in there?
Well, that’s much of what the last act of this film concerns itself with.
Often Cuchera
plays like a horror movie, despite the fact that it doesn’t involve ghosts or
chainsaw killers, and the approach is appropriate because the subject matter is
just as horrific as anything we could get from a haunted house or a bloody
summer camp. Cuchera is full of
tense, foreboding music, pools of blood, and piercing screams. People get
things forcefully inserted into their bodies, violently ripped out of their
bodies, and the scenes often feel a lot like the torture sequences from the Saw series. One thing that puts this
film above a lot of modern horror, however, is the presentation. We don’t see
gaping wounds, we just see blood trickles coming from them. We don’t see all
the grizzly details when something terrible is happening to a character;
instead we see their horrified reactions to it, or the reactions of others who
are watching. Some things are left to our imaginations, which tend to make
reality more horrific anyways. This is old school filmmaking, real utilitarian
stuff, and it’s nice to see the tricks of the trade come back to replace easy
CG fixes every once in a while. In a way, a film world that can create anything
you want with computer animation actually stifles creativity a bit. It’s with
limitation that resourcefulness comes, and any time I see a pool of red tinted
Karo syrup instead of splatters of CG blood, I have to smile.
Not that I was smiling much during this movie. This is a
tough watch. This isn’t fantasy or horror, this is real stuff that really
happens, and it’s all really difficult to digest. The poverty in the
Philippines is so omnipresent and the living conditions so third world that it
doesn’t make for a very fun place to set a film. Cuchera doesn’t much milk the setting for drama though. We don’t
get real insight into the characters’ struggles in their current environment or
where they want to end up. There’s just a pervasive sense that this drug mule
business is the sort of thing anybody who wants to make ends meet has to do.
There aren’t very many three dimensional characters here; we don’t get a whole
lot of development. In some ways Cuchera still
feels like a documentary about the drug trade and not so much a drama about
people. It’s more interesting than it is engaging, and it’s more horrific than
it is entertaining. While I’m grateful for having seen it, it’s not an
experience that everyone will want to have.
The brightest spot of the film, and the place where it
offers the most complexity, is in Maria Isabel Lopez’s performance as the main
character Isabel. Isabel is a long time prostitute and drug mule who is now trying
to set deals up herself, in order to finally get a leg up in this dog eat dog
world. To that end she has to recruit her own mules, and whom she goes after is
a group of confused and desperate children. Despite her exploitation of others
for money, and her working in the prostitution and drug trades, Isabel isn’t a
villain. She’s a woman who has made hard choices. You can see her struggling
with the moral complications of what she does. She tries to act as a mother
figure to her mules even as she is forcing them to do awful things so that she
can profit. You get a real sense that Isabel hates what she does, but there is
no other way. She may not be long for this Earth, and she needs to provide for
her family. Isabel is the one aspect of this film that keeps it human, she’s
what we have to hold on to as we watch horrible people doing horrible things,
and Lopez’s performance is a big part of what keeps you from covering your eyes
through the whole experience.
Those scenes where they’re loading the kids up, though… man,
they’re rough. Watching bags of drugs, about thirty at a time, getting forced
into every hole on a person’s body, whether they’re bleeding, or screaming, or
retching them up, is not a pretty sight. Isabel uses boiled Okra to lubricate
the balloon’s passages down the mules’ throats, and let’s just say, after
seeing this movie I will never eat Okra in my life. Ever.
Damsels in Distress
Back in the 90s director Whit Stillman made three movies
about rich young intellectuals overanalyzing their relationships and acting way
too neurotic for being so privileged. People really liked them, and they’ve
gone on to be pretty influential to some of the biggest indie directors working
today. Stillman himself hasn’t made another film since 1998’s The Last
Days of Disco, so getting a new film from him in 2011 is a pretty big deal
in some circles. For me personally, I’m not familiar with his previous work.
Stillman is a blind spot for me. So I went into Damsels in Distress not knowing what to expect. And what I found
took me a little bit of time to figure out.
The world of Damsels
in Distress looks pretty much like our own, if not a little sunnier and
more colorful, so I started into it expecting to watch a typical movie about
young people in college. And by typical, I guess I mean a movie about
characters who seem real and could really exist talking like actual human
beings. What I got was something else. The characters in Damsels in Distress are like nothing else you’ve ever come across.
The girls who serve as our protagonists have taken it upon themselves to make
the other students at their university into social projects. There’s a lot of
suicide that goes on around the campus, and our heroes feel like it has much to
do with poor hygiene and unpleasant odors. To combat this they’ve set up a
suicide prevention center, complete with coffee and donuts, that takes at risk
people and treats their conditions through the practicing and performance of
tap dance routines. There’s also a bit about distributing a particularly nice
smelling kind of soap to the freshman dorm, and some hypothesizing that it’s
better to date idiot frat boys rather than smart and attractive guys because it
serves a better social good. Boys in this world seem to exist either as playboy,
operator types or as over excitable, painfully dim puppy dogs. This little
rundown probably doesn’t do the complexities or the uniqueness of Stillman’s
world and characters justice, but I guess my point is that Damsels in Distress is a little whimsical, it has a dusting of the
fantastical, and it takes a while to grow accustomed to it’s rhythms and logic.
Often in criticisms of films like this writers call the
characters “quirky”, and they mean it as a term of derision. Sometimes, when
the characters are too weird to be relatable, that criticism is valid; but I find
that more often than not they’re just speaking to a difference in taste rather
than real fault in the film. I would definitely call the characters in this
film “quirky”, but I use it as a term of endearment. The dialogue in this film
is consistently hilarious. It’s full of random asides and absurdist logic, and
it really takes a bit of concentration to keep up with it and catch all of the
gags. The girls’ thoughts and opinions are often absurdist as well, but when
you get to know them over the course of the film, you begin to realize that
each character has her own logic system, and nothing is being done just for the
sake of weirdness. Despite the fact that they initially appeared more like
aliens than human beings, I found that I started liking them so much that once
some love triangle stuff starts popping up toward the end I was fully invested
in its outcome. Damsels in Distress is
a pretty layered experience and it’s lots of fun to dig into.
Probably the biggest reason why these unique beings end up
working as movie characters, aside from the writing, is that Stillman has found
a great group of girls to bring them to life. Carrie MacLemore plays Heather,
the dumb one, and she manages to keep that archetype from appearing tired or
cartoonish by adding a sweetness and an earnestness to everything she does.
Megalyn Echikunwoke plays Rose, who is a one note joke, but who milks a self
aware winking at how one note she is to create a running gag that works
throughout the entire film. Analeigh Tipton, who I first saw in Crazy, Stupid, Love, impressed me there
and continued to impress me here as Lily, the new girl who serves as our eyes
into this world. She’s great at showing vulnerability and making you feel
empathy for her, so she’ll probably have a big future in front of her as the
lead of romantic comedies. But the real star of the show is Violet. She’s like
the girl version of Max Fischer. She’s the leader of the group, and most of the
events that get put into motion come from her brain, they’re crafted by her
unique form of neurosis that seems to think, maybe rightly, that all of life’s
flaws can be fixed through aesthetic changes and the creation of dance numbers.
Greta Gerwig plays her, and if I thought that I went into this movie already
loving her as an actress, then I can’t even explain how I feel about her now.
In some ways it feels like this entire movie was designed as a vehicle to show
off Gerwig’s charms and to get you to fall in love with her as a performer. She
kills it with the deadpan dialogue, she makes you feverishly root for her
character, even when you don’t quite understand her logic or thinking, and she
just generally steals the movie out from under everyone else. You start the
film thinking that what you’re watching is going to be mostly about Lily, but
by the end of it you’ve been sucked into the orbit of Violet, who has a natural
gravity that makes her a visionary and a leader. And really, isn’t that a big
part of what we go to the movies for? To meet larger than life characters more
interesting than the ones we come across in real life?
Damsels in Distress is
kittens and rainbows; it’s like a great big hug. With its female protagonists,
who nearly come off as princesses, and its
several almost musical numbers, that are more fun than cheesy or off-putting,
it almost feels like you’re watching a Disney movie. Usually I don’t go for
this sort of cutesy stuff, but due to its wit and infectious energy, this one
had me hooked all the way through. How could you not like a movie that has a fratboy
character named Thor who never learned his colors? I didn’t know what to expect
when I walked into this one, but I walked out feeling like it was a fine way to
end my festival experience. Hell, I walked out of it smiling my stupid head
off.
