Back to the (not so great) past

 

New Orleans is one of those places where the decay of the bayou mingles with death (think the classic New Orleans jazz funeral), and voodoo and witchcraft haunts the streets of the French Quarter and Garden District. An appropriate setting, therefore, for the co-directing team of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead and the latest in their horror genre of character-driven stories that have very humanistic and philosophical edges - Synchronic, which opened in theatres, drive-ins and VOD this weekend. Steve (Anthony Mackie) and Dennis (Jamie Dornan) are EMTs working the overnight shift where they respond to a series of gruesome calls where people have died or are deeply traumatized. Turns out a new designer drug has been going around: Synchronic, which, believe it or not, takes people back in time. If only we could pop a pill for the experience, right? Well, Steve, who’s diagnosed with brain cancer and fears his days are numbered, decides to experiment. And it might make him find his buddy Dennis’s recently lost daughter, Brianna (Ally Ioannides), who also took the drug. Time travel in this case lasts only seven minutes. Thank goodness, because the past isn’t necessarily as romanticized as we sometimes think. Steve returns to the howling winds of the Ice Age and introduces fire to Early Man. Then he disappears into the era of the Conquistadors and is almost devoured by an alligator. Back in the present, and seeing the movie Back to the Future on TV, Steve tells the bartender, “the past fucking sucks!” And, surrounded by the panorama of New Orleans at night, he exclaims to Dennis, “the present is a miracle, bro.” These literal trips to earlier times are interspersed with the working days and nights of the two men’s lives. Dennis is constantly fighting with his wife Tara (Katie Aselton) and Steve, single and a bit of a player, tells him ultimately how good he has it. He describes his life – which could be all of ours – as defined by “random events, chance and luck.” And Dennis, reflecting on Steve’s possible last days, suggests, “all that crazy shit before you die, there’s infinite possibilities.” Both Mackie (Steve) and Dornan (Dennis) have built up substantial acting resumes. Mackie has appeared in 8 Mile, Million Dollar Baby and The Hurt Locker, Dornan in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette but likely is best known as Christian Grey in the Fifty Shades trilogy. Here they connect effortlessly in a classic buddy film with supernatural overtures. Some of the best cinematography occurs in the time travel sequences especially in the set of what was presumably the Battle of New Orleans.

In Montreal, alas, a virtual film festival

 

Given that many film festivals had gone virtual I almost jumped when I heard that Montreal’s well-regarded Festival du nouveau cinema (FNC) – 49th edition – was doing a combo virtual and in-person event. So, I reserved three tickets for its mainstay Cinéma Impérial, getting essentially the same right-side aisle seats I normally get in the plush historic downtown building (and where as a kid I went to see How the West Was Won,  The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm and  It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World in the then Cinerama theatre). The seat chart provided for plenty of social distancing. Then the axe fell. In late September, due to skyrocketing Covid in La Belle Province, indoor dining and theatres were forced to close. But the FNC swiftly made screenings entirely online and I got coupons. (Montreal in person was nice to visit in the fall anyway.) Back home I watched films online, admittedly not the same “event” as viewing in-person.

The first film: Last and First Men, famed Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson’s initial feature and an astonishing meditation on the worldly and otherworldly based on 1930s British author William Olaf Stapledon’s novel. A disembodied voice (Tilda Swinton) from two billion years in the future informs that as our world is in peril so too is the highly evolved future of advanced human species, also facing extinction. She tells us that, contrary to popular belief, the future is certainly not a “utopia” and “no such paradise existed through the eons that lie between your age and mine.” Jóhannsson’s classical and synthesizer score matches the surreal abstract landscape, the narrative’s visual counterparts. A film you might buy and watch again and again.  

 

The second film, from Japan, was by another first timer, Isamu Hirabayashi’s - Shell and Joint. Like Last and First Men its subject is the cosmos, life and death, birth and rebirth, and told through vignettes often in black humor. There are philosophical snippets. “Death is probably more boring” says Yoko (Mariko Tsutsui), who likes to contemplate suicide. To which her friend Nitobe (Keisuke Horibe) responds, “I love it when you talk that way.” Or, after a battle of the sexes argument she says, “In cosmic time does that last exchange…register as having existed at all?” Throughout the two hours-plus film there is the motif of crustaceans and insects paralleling human life and death cycles. And more. Guests in a pod hotel are cut off from one another. Animated insects philosophically fear death. “One moment you’re dreaming and then you’re dead,” observes one over a colleague – a cockroach’s - upturned body. And throughout a quirky jazz score by Watanabe Takashi underlines the offbeat touch.

The third film was actually made in 2014 by Guillaume Nicloux, The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq. A black comedy about a rumored real kidnapping of the famous and iconoclastic author, long a bête noire to the French literary and political establishments for his condemnation of postmodernism, the European Union and Islamism. The joy here is that Houellebecq stars in the film. It’s delicious to watch this supreme intellectual as a morbid sad sack who craves red wine and doesn’t mind the occasional fling with a prostitute. Asked why he looks tired, he replies “the press stresses me out.”  While amusing, I’d wished the film contained more political discussion. We get just a little. “Europe’s true vocation is to make democracy impossible and instead a government of experts,” Houellebecq declares. “I’m against it.”

The FNC is airing online through Oct. 31. And at $10 a pop it’s a treat for anyone who longs for films which tell stories that inevitably break the narrative, character or cinematic mold. www.nouveaucinema.ca

Albert Brooks - everyman's neurotic

 

The Criterion Channel’s decision last week to make a sleight of Albert Brooks movies available was just the ticket for a weekend of hilarity. There aren’t a whole lot of humorous films out there these days in a very sad and unfunny year. I’d never cottoned onto Albert Brooks during his 1980s and 90s heyday – he just seemed too conventional – but grew to admire his work, especially after seeing his 1996 Mother starring Debbie Reynolds. Now I’m in full Brooks adulation mode. Brooks is in the same league of younger 20th Century Jewish comedians like Woody Allen and Richard Dreyfuss – hyper, neurotic, narcissistic and sardonically funny. His films since the Nineties have been few and far between and nowhere as successful though he continues acting and doing voice work. I wonder why - maybe the earlier movies never did great at the box office? In Real Life (1979), Brooks spoofs the reality documentary by filming the story of a contemporary family (Charles Grodin is the dad) as it unintentionally disintegrates under the weight of its newfound notoriety. Brooks as the director is vain and Hollywood-shallow as he defies all around him – staff, producer, the family itself – who maintain the documentary won’t work out. In Modern Romance (1981) Brooks plays Robert Cole, a film editor, with Mary Harvard (Kathryn Harrold) his main squeeze. It opens with them breaking up over dinner because he’s adamant they don’t have enough in common. Then he drives himself crazy wooing her back, spying and stalking just short of criminality, until she acquiesces. But, of course, the relationship doesn’t end there. Lost in America (1985) (photo above), perhaps the best film of the five I watched, is the prototypical road movie but with a twist. Brooks and Julie Haggarty (always worth watching) are a Yuppie couple who are giving up on the rat race and hitting the road to find themselves. Their spiritual guide is the movie Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper 1969). But when Brooks as former ad man David Howard gives a thumbs up to an Easy Rider type biker from the window of his plush RV, the biker gives another kind of finger back. You get the idea. In Defending Your Life (1991) Brooks teams up with Meryl Streep. Both characters have died prematurely and end up in some limbo state called Judgment City where they’re put on trial over their life histories. This is the weakest of the films and too long but the sendups of modern hospitality (albeit in the afterlife) are amusing and Streep as Julia, who takes a romantic interest in Brooks, is incredibly charming and hilarious. Finally, in Mother, Brooks decides to retreat to his childhood home and move in with his mom Beatrice, played by Debbie Reynolds. It seems ridiculous for a semi-successful middle-aged writer to move home and redecorate his old bedroom like in high school. But the real delight is the dynamics between him and mom. Reynolds plays the oh-so-typical every mom - old school, a bit ditzy, and in her mind reasonable in a way their children find absurd. Attempts to bond between them are thwarted as the two are incapable seeing eye to eye. It’s not real conflict, just the frustration of two different generations trying to connect. Finally, a general observation on the films.  The era the movies were made in – yes, I lived through it – doesn’t seem that long ago but I guess it is. And they look aged – from square shaped tinny cars to clunky phones, shoulder pads and feathery hair, to DOS computers. And it’s startling to see that at one time people dressed-up.