Cinequest: FRICTION

The tagline on the FrICTION promotional material reads, "What if you were scripted to behave badly?" That phrase also emerges from the mouth of writer-director Cullen Hoback on nearly every occasion one hears him discussing the film. The problem with this tidy little catchphrase is that, while it does in a sense, describe the story without being overly revealing (the reality-bending that may or may not actually go on in the film is, apparently, a big, big secret), it also damns it with praise that is not only faint but also vague, misleading, and not all that interesting. All films contain characters who are scripted to behave badly. Well, okay, maybe not the Lumières' "Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat," but you see what I'm getting at. When you come right down to it, that tagline suggests nothing new or unique about the film, and does so in such a smugly earnest tone that I believe I may be forgiven for going into it expecting a self-indulgent indie wankfest that would make me roll my eyes for ninety minutes and emerge vowing never to watch another movie by its maker.

Well, guess what? It's a pretty gripping little picture that almost entirely subverted my expectations.

Reduced to basics, the story is straightforward. Jeremy and Amy Mathison run a performing arts summer camp for teens. Hoback agrees to teach its seven students in return for being allowed to use them as actors and crew on a feature film. He casts them as themselves and scripts one of the students--a loner played by the unreasonably talented and self-assured August Thompson--to come between the couple, resulting in the unravelling of their marriage. If that were all there were to it, it wouldn't amount to much. Furthermore, the story is full of tiny plot holes, and Jeremy's "character" is so steadfastly unlikeable that I found myself wondering how he and Amy ever got together in the first place. It's the way Hoback toys with the opacity of the fourth wall that keeps you watching and guessing. It's a narrative! No, it's a documentary about making a narrative! Wait, no, it's a narrative about a doc about making a narrative. Or is it?

A more apt question to pique the interest of potential viewers, then, might be: "Where is the fourth wall?" Because a whole lot of lip service is paid, both on and off the screen, to breaking it and yet it miraculously remains intact when the house lights come up. Comparisons to Soderbergh's Full Frontal and Altman's The Player seem inevitable, yet FrICTION is both more intimate and more guilefully slippery than either. If one were to peel away all the layers of this onion, one would likely find at the center a bit of Magritte scrawl proclaiming it not to be an onion. Bring your pipe to the screening.

Cinequest: BABNIK

Babnik, directed by Alejandro Adams, written and produced by Adams and Marya Murphy, unfolds like an elaborate piece of origami with a bomb hidden in the center.  We know the bomb is ticking, but Adams makes us spread open every last crease before it explodes.

Set in the Bay Area expat Russian community, the story revolves around a pair of slick characters named Sasha and Misha who run what appears to be a modelling agency but is actually a front for darker enterprises.  Girls turn up looking for work or seeking refuge from failed mail-order marriages.  In an exquisite character introduction, Misha delivers an identical seductive spiel to a succession of identical babes in tight black minidresses, as cameras flash in the background.  He praises their physical attributes in honeyed tones while encouraging them to invest in expensive vitamin and skincare regimens, conveniently stocked by the agency and guaranteed--as we divine by the scene's end--to indebt the girls enough to eventually coerce them into porn and prostitution.

Hapless telemarketer Artem is fired.  His emasculating wife, Yelena, expects a certain standard of living; if Artem cannot provide it, she will leave him.  Hoping to raise funds, he joins a high-stakes gambling group run by Sasha and Misha, but he only succeeds in becoming deeply financially obligated to them.

Concurrently, volatile Arseniy makes life hell for his teenaged sister, Nika.  She can't do anything right for him.  At one point, he berates her for typing too loudly while he's trying to rest.  When she closes her door so he won't hear, he screams at her for doing so.

Yelena wants money, Nika wants out from under Arseniy's thumb, and Sasha and Misha want whatever will further their business ventures.  An elaborate setup, with Artem as the fall guy, allows them all a chance to achieve their goals.  And Artem is in no position to argue.  In one long take, Sasha and Misha explain to him what he must do.  The camera never moves from their adamant faces, as they goad him with repeated exhortations of "Look at me, Artem" and "Pay attention, Artem."  When Adams finally cuts to Artem's reaction, he is nearly in tears, utterly and fatally trapped.

This is a story about control.  Perception of power in any given scene shifts from character to character, as if driven by a hyperactive focus servo.  At first glance, one is tempted to accuse Adams of playing it easy on the men.  Ultimately, only Sasha and Misha go unchallenged for dominance.  And in this world, a woman's only means of achieving power over men is through sex or death; there is no middle ground between these extremes.  Misha's head girl schools a new recruit, using a porno as a textbook.  "That hurts at first, but don't be afraid to try it.  It will melt any man," she says.  Then she nimbly shifts to instructing Artem in how to kidnap a young girl, while the porn plays on in the background.  But, as we eventually learn, the suffering endemic to the sex trade is equal-opportunity.  And the final and lingering image of Nika, paid off by Misha for her part in the plot and having refused a ride into town, stalking fearlessly alone down a rural road, suggests that the playing field has just become incrementally more level.  Nika is, in her quiet and expressionless way, a force to be reckoned with.  She deserves her own sequel.

If there is any flaw, it is that the pieces of the plot fall into place just a little too conveniently at the climax.  Arseniy does exactly what Sasha and Misha expect him to at exactly the right time.  One wonders what would have happened if he hadn't--a definite possibility, given that he is not only volatile but also intensely self-interested.  How would Sasha and Misha have gotten Artem out of the way?  And under what pretext could they have delivered Arseniy to his eventual fate?  The filmmakers clearly place great value on realism, but at this one small yet vital point in the plot, they appear to reject it.

Babnik remains, however, a masterful mood piece, beautifully executed.  The throbbing electronic pulse of a score builds tension and suspense.  The story is punctuated by scenes in untranslated Russian or lengthy silences in which only enigmatic glances move the action forward.  And move it they do.  The actors--professional and amateur alike--are wonderful to watch.  There are no caricatures in this film.  The bad guys hang at their suburban house or cruise in their SUV like ordinary people, laughing and joking with the few girls who have not only survived the business but mastered their part in it.  Occasional sudden moments of casual violence are often all that remind us of the criminal undercurrents roiling beneath the surface.

The rhythm of the film is the rhythm of sex.  A seemingly interminable build, by the end of which the tension reaches an almost unbearable peak, is followed by an explosive crescendo.  Then the filmmakers roll over and go to sleep while we sit in the dark, limp and drained, considering the implications and wondering whether to get up and leave or linger until morning.  Any theatre that screens Babnik should hand out Ziganovs at the door.

Cinequest: PASSENGER SIDE

Protagonist Michael (Adam Scott) is disturbed early on his birthday by a call from his brother Tobey (Joel Bissonnette).  Tobey's car has broken down, and he begs a ride from Michael, ostensibly to a job interview.  Michael agrees reluctantly, and the two are off to not just one but a series of seedy Los Angeles destinations.  After the first couple of stops, Michael begins to suspect that not only is there no interview but that Tobey, a recovering addict, has coerced him into driving him around in search of a score.

He confronts Tobey, who confesses that he is trying to locate his estranged girlfriend Theresa, with whom he had a heartfelt phone conversation the previous night.  Theresa wants to get back together.  Both are clean now, and Tobey still loves her and is convinced that this time they can make it work.  The catch: Theresa needs time to put her emotional affairs in order and has given Tobey no way to contact her.  But Tobey can't wait.

Therein lies the problem.  Because if Tobey loves her as much as he says he does, why can he not grant her the few days she requests?  Either he doesn't trust her, or his sheer enthusiasm compels him to intrude on her life before she's ready for him.  Conversely, if Theresa is as serious about Tobey as he is about her (he's talking about marriage and kids), then how could she possibly not at least give him a phone number?  Either she's stringing him along, or the plot is simply contrived to get Tobey and Michael in a car together on this particular day.

The brothers chase around LA, racking up brief, weird encounters and collecting clues to Theresa's whereabouts that ultimately lead nowhere.  At nightfall, they find themselves near a bar and give up.  Tobey, none the worse for their failure, his perpetual beatific grin still in place, offers to buy Michael a celebratory birthday drink.  They go in, and, miraculously, Theresa appears.  She no less a cipher in her one brief scene; nothing she does or says really tells us what we'd like to know about her.  She seems anguished, but for which of several possible reasons?  The twist, when it comes, casts her in rather a bad light and also makes us wonder what motivates Michael to ferry his brother around the city all day and even out into the desert in search of her.  The questions we harbor about both Theresa and Tobey make the romantic union climax more ambivalent than satisfying.

It's an interesting choice, keeping what may be the most complex character off-screen for almost the entire film, and I'm not sure it works, although the twist itself and the scattered incidents which foreshadow it are solid.  Writer-director Matt Bissonnette might have served his story better by spending less time on the screamingly quirky minor characters the brothers run into and more on the logic behind the relationships that are what really move this road movie along. 

Despite the contrivances, however, these characters are real people with real issues, at points in their lives where perhaps getting back up to neutral has become the equivalent of "happy."  Scott and Bissonnette are fun to watch as fractious siblings.  And there is a suggestion of growth in the rigid and eccentric Michael at the end, albeit with a certain haziness about how he arrived there.  Passenger Side is an LA story, after all.  Maybe it's best that some of the answers stay lost in the smog.

Cinequest: LEFT (LINKS)

In Left (Links), even before things start to go obviously awry for protagonist Dexter, something is not quite right about his world.  The surfaces are too sterile, the furniture too perfectly arranged, the quiet, tree-lined streets too empty.  As Dexter scurries back and forth between his quiet, pleasant apartment and his quiet, pleasant workplace, he often appears to be the only moving figure in the landscape.  His life is so perfectly compartmentalized that he is spared the effort of having to really live it.

Only Dexter's pet mice stimulate his emotions.  He calls to them from the door as he arrives home every evening, the way one might call to a spouse or child.  Near the beginning, he lovingly assembles a new wheel for the mice and places it tenderly in their cage.  With humans, however, he is at a loss, interacting with them because he is compelled to, not because he wishes to.  Even with his girlfriend Stella he is restrained, more polite than passionate.  After tripping over some of her stuff in the middle of the night when she stays over, he tentatively offers to build a cabinet for her things.  When she accepts, his face is suffused with the same tenderness as his mice inspire.  He has found a way he can relate to her.

Chaos creeps into his ordered world.  The building he works in is being remodeled, and the workers are none too mindful of Dexter's boundaries.  Stella tries to clean the mouse cage and accidentally allows the mice to escape.  Mysterious scratches and dents appear on his car.  He begins to have difficulty distinguishing one person from another.  Is the woman before him Stella, or the new receptionist at work, or a doctor in the psychiatric hospital to which he suddenly finds himself committed?

 

The combined effects of writer-director Froukje Tan's careful camera work and the clean, brilliant colors of locations and props create the most user-friendly dystopia imaginable.  The restrained score by Easy Aloha's melts down into primitive electronic bleeps and bloops as Dexter's world unravels.  Warning of the perils of modern technologically-enhanced life even as it celebrates the strange beauty thereof, the film is a thematic and aesthetic successor to Antonioni's Red Desert.

When Dexter has finally recovered enough to return to work, the remodelling is finished.  Gone are his workbench, his bins of electronic bits and bobs, his oscilloscope.  Instead, he will now occupy a cubicle containing only a computer.  Slick gray surfaces have replaced colorful clutter.  In a world in which the line between work time and down time is often blurred, when our personal and professional lives are increasingly indistinguishable, the lesson is clear.  And Dexter has learned it; the alteration in the appearance of his world reflects the change in his perceptions.

In the final scene, in which he returns to the hospital to reconnect with a fellow patient--another Stella doppelgänger--we see that, in losing a part of himself, he has gained humanity and the ability to genuinely relate to others.  No longer able to maneuver on auto-pilot, he is left with only one thing to do: live.

Left is a film to be watched closely.  Tan is a master of subtlety who rewards an alert audience and refuses to indulge a lazy one.  As with Dexter's world, both the devil and the delight are in the details.

Cinequest Opening Night: THE GOOD HEART

Superficially, The Good Heart, written and directed by Dagur Kári, seems promising: an intimate, character-driven story with a pleasantly murky aesthetic, starring two strong actors. And it's not without charm. But three major issues, all of which could and should have been solved at the writing stage, undermine the performances and hamper the finished film: lack of character development, unclear motivation, and structural problems.

Kári goes to great length to impress his protagonists' characteristics on the audience. Lucas (Paul Dano) is a compassionate street waif who cares so much about others--even complete strangers--that he's unable to refuse anyone anything, although his generosity is repaid with little but grief. Jacques (Brian Cox) is an irascible bar owner with few friends and no family who needs a protege to take over his establishment for him when he finally suffers one heart attack too many.

But so much of what they do contradicts Kári's careful characterizations. For example, Lucas, the ultimate giver, attempts suicide at the beginning, thoughtlessly leaving the tiny kitten on which he dotes unprotected and uncared-for. Jacques is driven to a frenzy and a fifth heart attack when a relaxation tape tells him to envision himself on a white-sand beach. We later learn that just such a beach in Martinique is his favorite place. The inconsistencies continue throughout.

Predictably, as the story progresses, Jacques is influenced for the better by Lucas' seraphic disposition, and Jacques' molding brings out a few sharp edges in Lucas. However, too much growth happens offscreen, and the motivation for change is too often not externalized. Characters are one way in one scene and different in the next, and Kári rarely allows us to see the progression that gets them from A to B. Additionally, we never get any sense of the characters' past. What brought the gentle Lucas to the streets? Whence springs Jacques' perpetual and debilitating anger? If we were given even a hint, their initial behavior and subsequent transformations might seem less arbitrary, their personalities less one-dimensional.

That it's impossible to tell how much time is passing compounds the problem. How long does Lucas' apprenticeship last? A month? A year? The only chronological marker we are given (toward the very end of the movie) is the winter holidays, but, as it always seems to be winter in this coldly blue-lit city, that means little. Additionally, sometimes the scenes occur in a slightly illogical order, as if Kári had shuffled his index cards before writing the script.

A girl shows up. Lucas marries her immediately, despite the fact that they don't seem to be in love and Jacques hates her. The girl flirts with a customer and Lucas throws her out, whereupon Jacques professes to have liked--or at least not disliked--her, after all. Lucas becomes bitter and withdrawn, although the only reason we really know this is that Jacques tells him (and us) so.

Jacques gets on the heart donor recipient list and gives up smoking and drinking. Stripped of the armor of his vices, he becomes serene; a few scenes later, he's verging on vegetarianism. Lucas, gripping a cleaver in one hand and, in the other, the duck he had been about to butcher for their Christmas dinner, says mildly, "You've become a sissy, Jacques."

The inevitable climax is too telegraphed and too convenient to be satisfying. At least Kári didn't fall into the trap of making Lucas' ultimate sacrifice one of his own choosing, which would have pushed the story irretrievably into bathos. That what happens is due to pure chance is fitting and proper.

There's some good dialogue, although one wishes Kári hadn't predicated most of the lighter moments on the idea that there's nothing funnier than watching an old guy swear. And Cox and Dano entertain despite the script's shortcomings. Certain moments do ring true, and they cast light into the dark corners that do not. Movies, like life, are always imperfect.