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
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