At last, seduction: the festival ended on a crescendo with Ennio, Giuseppe Tornatore’s expansive yet intimate tribute to the great Morricone. This is no superficial primer: Tornatore edits the film with intense musicality, cutting between furious, percussive phrases and long cadenzas. He is also uncompromising in tracing a line through Morricone’s work for lesser-known Italian films as much as the big productions, and in the invaluable technical notes he collects from critics and composers along the way.
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Coming into this year’s festival, I couldn’t help being preoccupied by Nathan Fielder’s TV series The Rehearsal and the way that its lovely literalness has surpassed so much of art cinema – most of the Greek New Wave and certainly any number of American indies, with their forceful reliance on quirk and deadpan. After watching The Rehearsal, even a French fantasy like Quentin Dupieux’s Incredible but True seems tame and restrained, afraid to embrace the full extravagance of its premise: the discovery of a time-travel chute in a couple’s basement. The film starts briskly but after the revelation of the time tunnel, it becomes disappointingly static, as if the novelty of the plot was enough and no further innovation needed.
Dupieux’s isn’t the first film to propose teleporting through an everyday object – see Hot Tub Time Machine (2010) and Hideki Takeuchi’s ingenious Thermae Romae (2012), which calmly posits that the ideals of ancient Rome have been realized in contemporary Japan – but it approaches the concept with the least conviction, as if fearful of straying too far from whimsy.
The Rehearsal. Courtesy HBO
Fielder has no such hesitations. In The Rehearsal, as well as its brilliant predecessor Nathan for You, Fielder carries surrealism to its logical ends, stitching himself and other people into the work of “pure imagination.” The Rehearsal stages an interference in the world, offering participants a chance to play out complex emotional scenes while surrounded by replicas of their families, friends, and environments, all painstakingly recreated for the show. Under these conditions, you can rehearse a difficult scenario – pained confessions, separation anxiety, a parent-child talk – again and again until you get it right. Should you feel conflicted about parenthood, a series of sample sons can be provided through auditions with child actors. The goal is flawless human interaction, without the risk of spontaneity.
A fearless fantasist, Fielder has no compunction about cloning personalities or leaving an endless trail of simulations – with Daddy-shaped imprints – in his wake. His serious conviction is that reality is both delicate and insufficient, needing help to sculpt it into the ideal, livable work of art. Essentially this is about designing systems for regulating and reordering human beings, navigating the business of relationships in a coolly linear way. I love Fielder’s on-screen persona: the way he states bald facts and performs outrageous acts with an avoidance of emotional tone. Wary of bonding with the show’s kid actors, he affects a cold demeanor to prevent overattachment.
If Fielder’s approach to reshaping reality makes a mild comedy like Incredible but True all but redundant, there were several other filmmakers at MIFF who met or matched the Fielder wavelength. First among them must be Hong Sang-soo, the South Korean director whose forensic studies of behavior have been screening here for over 20 years. The fact that MIFF’s cinema programs were cancelled by COVID for the last two years has meant an unprecedented withdrawal from the world of Hong, whose films require the big screen all the more for focusing on conversational minutiae.
Like Fielder, Hong is an auteur intent on rearranging human beings, his men and women incidental to the larger narrative structures they inhabit. His characters are often film directors, scriptwriters, or novelists, creating endless fictional reframings of the same scene. If an encounter between two people proves unsatisfactory, they can replay it once more with (or without) feeling. As in Fielder, many of Hong’s characters see spontaneity as a curse, a disease to be eliminated by the exhaustive follow-though of “logic.” They cast about for improvements to their lives, trying to upgrade the actors/characters around them, as if downloading a patch or plug-in for a relationship. While the films have ruthlessly abstract diagrams for plots, pinning human samples like graphed points across a visual field, emotional contingencies do emerge.
The title of Hong’s The Novelist’s Film implies a slightly misshapen work, the forcing of one form onto another. Throughout the film, Hong makes that forcefulness and distortion evident, testing the abilities of cinema to depict novelistic emotion. Long passages of dialogue are nothing new in Hong, but here he plays a game of restriction, with characters launching into intense physical descriptions of places we never see. Eschewing the “show don’t tell” principle of storytelling, his characters seem to do nothing but tell, talking about books, architecture, and images in overwhelming detail. Sometimes they wear face masks, removing their expressions so that there is even more emphasis on the verbal. They look out of windows or off-camera to discuss objects we can’t see, as if gesturing toward what gets left out in the process of adaptation. With a few shots, Hong could easily resolve the curiosity that these descriptions inspire, but he seems determined to reject cinema’s indexical powers, replacing image with word where possible.
When novelist and aspiring director Jun-hee (Lee Hye-young) keeps outlining the film she wants to make, speaking about cinema as if she were dancing about architecture, what we’re witnessing is a play of formal parameters: how far can speech and a static camera go in communicating her vision? In one scene, Jun-hee becomes fascinated with sign language and asks for a poem to be translated into signs, which she tries to replicate – for instance, using a slight squeeze of the hand to convey urgency and speed. Her attraction to sign language – admiring the external shapes from a distance, conceptually – resembles her interest in cinema. The Novelist’s Film is about showing us the signs and forms of filmmaking, rather than putting them in the service of narrative. Characters frequently refer to the sunshine and the delicious, springlike weather, but we get no sense of climate or sensuality through the high-contrast black-and-white frames. The hard, glaring whites don’t let in a trace of the promised heat, and the film is unrelentingly wintry despite all the talk of thaw. A feeling is reported instead of being discovered.
Perhaps this is a cliché of what a novelist’s film would look like: a lot of discussion about sensation and appetite without the means to stimulate them. But it’s also a way for Hong to shut off cinematic possibilities one by one – of action, sound, textural involvement, even the actors’ capacity for expression. What remains when the elements we associate with film are systematically eliminated? At one point, Jun-hee meets a director and his wife and has a lengthy conversation about the term “charisma”: who has it and whether it really exists. Charisma appears to function here as a branded, marketable quality, a shiny coin. But does it actually stand for anything in particular, or is it merely an irresistible word with no relation to the real?
Even in scenes where the focus is largely on dialogue, words seem to be empty of content. Most characters speak in airy generalities, using words like “charisma” for their star power and giving compliments that show no knowledge of the other person’s character (for instance, saying a person is “pure-hearted” means almost nothing at all). A powerful personality like Jun-hee alternates between polite chat and alarmingly precise digs directed at colleagues. Is charisma a matter of decibels – the ability to hone sharp words in a shapeless world? Like many of Hong’s women, Jun-hee is a relentless questioner with an interrogative mind that needs placating. But all the discussion of language and its weightlessness leads to a feeling of unreality.
The Novelist’s Film. Screenshot
Jun-hee’s plans for making a film are similarly elusive. She says that she can only write a script after choosing the performers, seeing what emerges from the encounter between a face and an environment. By this reasoning, subject is a matter of casting, and “plot” is what happens when a professional actor wanders into your frame. Walking in the park, Jun-hee runs into Gil-soo (Kim Min-hee), a star actress who is endlessly obliging and open to narrative suggestion: if this is a novelist’s film, Gil-soo is a writer’s actor. Meeting Gil-soo inspires Jun-hee to sketch out a direction for her film, using that urgent little squeeze learned from sign language, although she remains purposely vague about the details. But even this vagueness is a precious concept that needs defending: when the visiting poet Man-soo (Ki Joo-bong) hears about Jun-hee’s project, he also comes up with a brilliant idea he’s eager to share. However, Jun-hee won’t have it: her ethereal vision can’t be weighed down with plot content. As is typical in Hong, a character with an excess of story suggestions is urged to suppress them. The excited poet has his fire tamped down, and the idea disappears like smoke.
While The Novelist’s Film dances around the idea of fiction, this is not one of those movies in which a masterpiece is said to be produced that the film conveniently neglects to show us (Almodóvar’s Broken Embraces, 2009, is the exemplar of this genre, ending with a supposed work of genius that we long to see in place of the last two hours). We do get to see Jun-hee’s final film, but by that time our interest is in the characters on the margins, who make small talk while the projector runs. It’s Hong gesturing toward the idea of making a film – and not necessarily this one.
The Cathedral would make a superb double bill with Robert Redford’s Ordinary People (1980), both determinedly plain films in which the banality is part of the point. Ricky D’Ambrose’s coming-of-age drama seems to be filmed and performed in a vacuum, as if all the family members were cast by Nathan Fielder. The film presents the story of a middle-class Long Island clan smoothly and plausibly, but with something missing: creating a feeling of distance that keeps our narrative interest but allows for no depth penetration. As Jesse (Robert Levey II) grows up, there is no mood, no particular flavor, to his experience: all of the scenes are peculiarly neutral in tone.
What does strike us is the aggressively normcore textures of advertising throughout his life: the upbeat voice-overs and the mesmerizing blandness of commercials. The Gulf War and 9/11 take place and the family unit breaks up, but the boy seems more absorbed by the “wallpaper” of life: not only advertising but the specific arrangement of flowers on a chintz sofa or a clean blue stripe on the wall. These images are what linger in the memory, more than the idle drop-in of world events: as in Bertrand Bonello’s Saint Laurent (2014), historical incidents pass by with the protagonist mostly unreactive to them. Jesse’s scrutiny is directed elsewhere: to the irrelevant pictures in his house of faraway idylls, or an over-enunciated turn of phrase on TV.
The boy lives a textbook life, to the point where his memories resemble one of the Kodak ads we see: a snapshot of childhood shows a blue plate with three apple slices and a cheese sandwich with one bite taken out of it. This visual immersion is seen as a facing away from the world: landmark events can’t shake the impregnable sense of daily-ness. Reports of war, even deaths in the family, are like interruptions in the normal broadcast of life, pulling us momentarily away from the material textures of suburban culture.
Is this what it’s like to be a generic product of one’s times? Most of Jesse’s life seems to be lived absent-mindedly, with the eye sliding distractedly along surfaces, engrossed by small details of structure and line. The depiction of home life is relentlessly beige – vanilla, if you will – and Jesse himself presents an opaque, unrevealing face to the camera. With its declarative, straight-edge narration, The Cathedral approaches the studied banality of Brady Corbet, whose Vox Lux (2018) showed us horrifying events editorialized in the tone of an after-school special. In The Cathedral, it’s not until Jesse takes a class on picture analysis that we start to examine the strange, potentially sinister, implications of this normcore existence. He realizes that he has no recollection of his childhood without daylight: he can’t recall a single instance of a light source within his father’s house. The fact that this boy has no memories of night is one of the few startling revelations in this otherwise impassive film.
In The Balcony Movie, documentarist Pawel Lozinski builds human interest from the ground up. He spends most of two years on the balcony of his Warsaw apartment, allowing life to accumulate by his front door. With an exciting sparsity of means, Lozinski trains his camera on the ground outside and waits for strangers to cross the field and constitute subjects. As each person strolls or skates into view, they are asked to “stop here and say something”: an invitation to tell stories, to be self-conscious, sometimes to dazzle.
How do everyday people measure up as characters? Scraped knees and priests offer possible, if conventional, material for drama; one man attempts a Catholic conversion on the spot. Several passers-by relish the chance to show off a dry, cynical wit: there is no shortage of nihilists in this Polish suburb. Some people have no trouble holding and keeping fictional space; for others, the request to “look for topics” and “say anything” causes them to assess their own level of interest as protagonists, a Sartrean exercise in meta-scripting. A child slips into advertorial-speak – and can’t break out of it – when asked to say something “extraordinary.” And it’s no surprise that the person who offers the most concise summary of herself is an Instagram influencer, able to give an easy account of her preferences in clean, legible strokes.
Most intriguing are the slices of conversation made delicious by truncation, such as an informally charming stranger who walks off the words “There’s always a story,” and a woman openly celebrating a death without a hint of the macabre. Lozinski hits gold when he meets a former burglar caught up in a Dostoyevskian scenario: contemplating whether it’s worth restarting the cycle of theft, incarceration, and parole purely out of boredom. Between these encounters, the camera frequently returns to the dead time and space of the empty street, studying the grid of shabby stones and the wire that demarcates the film frame. This rectangular space requires a lot of maintenance: the grass borders are mowed by a frail older woman and the leaves are constantly raked. It’s a luxury to stand above while others work to clear the pavement and shovel snow. Even a blank field devoid of action needs pruning and grooming to keep its parameters in check.
If Lozinski appears to regard filmmaking as tending to a small, personal plot of land, we become conscious of the significance of that land when a nationalist march reaches the street, spraying homophobic and anti-immigrant slurs. Not everyone can stand on a balcony with impunity, but this director is in the position of being able to question protestors without risk. Lozinski’s wife is also very mindful of his balcony privileges: the fact that she shops and tidies around him, and must walk through the film frame to summon his attention.
At these times we become particularly aware of Lozinski as one of the film’s subjects, one with slightly evasive tendencies and a curiosity that intensifies when it comes to sexuality. As one interviewee asks, “How do you sleep at night after hearing all kinds of tales?” Perched on his balcony, demanding to hear stories, Lozinski places himself in an elegant position: that of a prize being serenaded by suitors.
Decision to Leave. Screenshot
Unlike most neo-noir, Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave is wildly disorienting rather than delicious. Despite the seductions of a rich soundtrack and the most beguiling of recent femmes fatales, you never know where you are in this film – whose memory or which time scheme we may be inhabiting at any given point. Hae-jun (Park Hae-il) is a Busan detective juggling cases including a corruption investigation, but all are emotionally overshadowed by the presence of Seo-rae (Tang Wei), the “shocking” wife who is a suspect in her husband’s murder. Seo-rae seems totally unshaken by the death, or at least unwilling to go through the motions expected of a widow. Rather than openly grieve, she makes bloodless comments in a low controlled voice. Is she heartless, or is her abruptness a matter of being foreign, a Chinese immigrant whose Korean is still tentative? Either way, Hae-jun is fascinated by this woman of sharp words who takes a softly-softly approach to dressing, wearing cashmere and crushed velvet, changeable colors that shift under the light.
As in Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964), Seo-rae is a cool woman with hidden reserves of empathy and potentially passion – but the real mystery lies in how she is perceived. The swooping camera treats us to visions of Seo-rae “caught” looking pensive in her apartment, brooding over secret thoughts, but what is the source of these disturbingly personal close-ups? Are they the product of stakeouts or the projections of the smitten detective? Or are they part of the cluster of imagery that surrounds any desired woman under scrutiny?
In her great feature debut in Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution (2007), Tang played a young agent trained to attract men through role-playing, having to seem charismatic yet unguarded. This woman was conflicted about the nature of acting, showing us both the glamour and self-sabotage inherent in public performance. In Decision to Leave, Seo-rae moves through a series of immaculate, affecting poses while under surveillance: perfect fodder for a cop with too much noir on the brain.
Decision to Leave. Screenshot
This device works so well because Tang is an actress whose intrigue holds up at every angle, from the movements of her hurt, sensitive hands to the light strands of hair framing her profile. The camera laces together shots of Seo-rae with scenes of routine police work; a conversation with her surpasses the exhilaration of a chase sequence. Seo-rae’s foreignness only adds to her mystique – her being an immigrant in Korea (and Tang’s status as a visiting international star) is comparable to Rita Hayworth’s exoticism and fluency in Chinese in The Lady from Shanghai (1947).
The entire film is shot like a sizzle reel, in which emotional peaks take precedence over crime revelations, with a rapture that transcends the cliché of the unreliable narrator. The fluid yet absurdist direction mislays time and place cues that might help us make sense of what we see: rushing torrents of images sweep us away before we can establish their origins.
At times the film is almost too flagrant about its genre intentions, disclosing mystery upon mystery with such intensity that it approaches the near-comedy of Basic Instinct (1992), in which the femme fatale is a machine for teasing out paranoia and narrative possibilities. The character of Seo-rae is a ready-made siren: she even wears a flashing lamp in one scene that pulses like a red heat sensor behind her.
But Decision to Leave turns out to be more oneiric and immersive than anything in Verhoeven. The camera has access to moments of interiority and intimacy that elude the rational brain: there is no gap between formal investigation and private space, imagination and evidence. Any breaks in linearity are smoothed over by a soundtrack featuring Mahler and original compositions by Cho Young-wuk: a score that is almost Morricone-like in its extravagance, the sonic equivalent of the plunging camera that both romanticizes and disorients. We are jolted into close-ups without transition or explanation: the effect is of waking up to sudden proximity, as if we have been drugged or dreaming.
This year, MIFF’s program of experimental shorts (disclosure: I am on the advisory panel for curating this section) had a common theme of sense confusion. Belgian artist Eva Giolo’s The Demands of Ordinary Devotion relished mixing up sight with taste and touch, pairing images with cracking and crisp noises that made them seem edible and tactile. Sound stimuli convinced us that we could squelch and bite into almost any object, from everyday utensils to human bodies. Using sensation as a guiding principle, Giolo showed us an exhalation “causing” a dent in a solid surface and a pomegranate emerging as a ripe consequence of a previous scene. Rajee Samarasinghe’s Show Me Other Places also presented images that demanded touching, provoking multiple senses at a time: a girl wearing a VR headset being nuzzled by a dog, solarized footage of super-fine eyelashes, and a shot of lipstick-red sand narrowing in an hourglass.
Giving an explicit political context to the work of the senses was Nazarbazi, Maryam Tafakory’s collage of scenes from Iranian cinema, in which depictions of touch are forbidden. The film is a history of secret glances and hidden intimacies, moments in which the eroticism of contact has been displaced into other sensual pleasures: lolling a candy in one’s mouth, applying lipstick, sharing a lollipop, even caressing a wound. And the standout finale was Joseph Wilson’s Isn’t It a Beautiful World, in which queer performers give lip-synched testimony against a background of electronic sounds, telling stories of desire that has been denied.
At last, seduction: the festival ended on a crescendo with Ennio, Giuseppe Tornatore’s expansive yet intimate tribute to the great Morricone. This is no superficial primer: Tornatore edits the film with intense musicality, cutting between furious, percussive phrases and long cadenzas. He is also uncompromising in tracing a line through Morricone’s work for lesser-known Italian films as much as the big productions, and in the invaluable technical notes he collects from critics and composers along the way.
There’s no doubt that the subject requires epic treatment. Morricone has set the tone for so many of our film genres, bringing an air of amusement and mockery to the giallo of Dario Argento and giving the edge of laceration to the crime thriller for Elio Petri and Brian De Palma. In Petri’s Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970), his tinkling, toying piano evokes the shabby ingenuity of the criminal and the maneuverings at the heart of a corrupt society. For Marco Bellocchio’s stunning psychological drama Fists in the Pocket (1965), the composer came up with an array of glinting, dissonant sounds. As Morricone says, “Dissonant music disables the senses,” and the score plays on the twisted nerves of Bellocchio’s protagonist as he starts to resemble the maddened killer of a giallo, unhooking action from meaning.
The theme for De Palma’s The Untouchables (1987) makes for one of the greatest title sequences of all time, stricter and bolder than any scene in the film itself. Its military clip holds us in a vice as the letters of the credits fall into line, while a trailing harmonica suggests something small and internal within the larger workings of the system, an echo of the whistle from his scores for Westerns.
Morricone’s introduction of the whistle and the pan flute to the ’60s Western must have seemed bizarre and counterintuitive at the time, but that lone note of introspection has become an indispensable mark of the genre. Fifty years later he was able to reshape the Western once more in The Hateful Eight (2015), giving Tarantino the full symphonic treatment but with a subtle undercurrent of parody, its spiraling orchestration seeming to lurch out of control. The score is both ominous and funny: it is self-consciously grandiose and almost ludicrous in its pile-on of suspense. Morricone is underrated as a humorist – witness the sung credits of Pasolini’s The Hawks and the Sparrows (1966), the composer recognizing that the director’s reinvention of film grammar needed a corresponding break in musical language.
For me the genius of Morricone lies in the fact that his music hits the heartstrings despite its self-awareness, as if to say: you know the story, you know how this goes, but you’re going to feel it anyway. Even for a minor giallo such as What Have You Done to Solange? (1973), he creates the feeling of an immersive past, a long-standing passion being reignited, with all the associated trains of memory flowing back. That sensation is amplified in his extraordinary scores for Mike Nichols’s Wolf (1994) and Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America (1984), both uncharacteristically emotional films for their directors. The latter is the culmination of Morricone’s career, its theme coming to a surge as two men reflect on their shared history and all the old romances are reawakened: of early New York, childhood ambition, sworn loyalties. The big reveal in Ennio is that the actors shot their scenes with Morricone’s score playing from the speakers, so that they were fully steeped in his rhythms as they performed, rising to the occasion in time with the music. More than just affecting, Morricone’s work is about the stage of becoming emotional, the realization that wells up and can’t be forced down. His swelling orchestration suggests the revival of a long-suppressed feeling, the architecture of the past resurrecting itself – what one critic calls the “cathedral” of his style. Memory comes coursing back, and even the face of James Woods becomes haunted and graven in the process.
So it’s both predictable and hugely satisfying that Tornatore saves that note of searing emotionalism for the reappearance of Ennio’s wife Maria, the music mounting as we recognize that she was his first and most trusted audience, the one who approved each piece even before his producers heard it. Throughout the film Morricone has been insistent on the experimental aspect of his work, claiming to be inspired by the atonality of John Cage as much as Mahler or Bach. He professes an indifference to melody despite his absolute fluency in it; he can sample the nobility of orchestration while putting pomp in its place. Toward the end he states that “we are out of melodic combinations” and that uplifting tunes have had their day. But there’s no escaping the dramatic reasoning of the music as it crests with the emergence of Maria. From the removal of tone and emotion, it all comes flooding back.
