Gateway Cinephiles

StLIFF: Day Three

Of Time and the City
2008 (UK)
Director: Terence Davies

The rudimentary architecture that one expects of documentary films–facts, tilted this way or that, conveyed by means of a simple narrative–is nowhere to be found in Terence Davies’ Of Time and the City. Serving as both ode and elegy to the Liverpool of his youth, the film lazes through archival footage of the industrial city, most in black-in-white, some in color. Davies himself narrates–his exquisitely British voice all scratchy wool and rich cream–offering remembrances of his own life that illuminate the generalities of a bittersweet urban existence. Proceeding much like the wandering thoughts of a reflective old man (which I suppose it is), Of Time and the City takes its sweet time getting nowhere. It’s the sort of film-making that throws you for a loop, if only because its approach is so unusual. (The only stylistic fellow traveler that springs to mind is Koyaanisqatsi, but only because that film is so de-personalized in comparison.) However, owing to the potency of Davies’ warm, tear-wetted poetics, the film’s meditative qualities are never off-putting. In short, Of Time and City, is a strange, beautiful little film, a memory thrown up on screen with all its indulgences and ambivalence intact.

Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father
2008 (USA)
Director: Kurt Kuenne

There’s really no faulting Kurt Kuenne’s intentions or zeal in Dear Zachary, a remembrance of his friend Andrew Bagby that is as unabashedly canonizing in its treatment of the man as it is scathing in its assessment of his death. A young doctor just beginning his career in family practice, Bagby touched people across nations and oceans with his friendship and humor, before he was brutally gunned down by his lunatic girlfriend. Kuenne initially undertook Dear Zachary as a cinematic letter to Andrew’s infant son, born to the accused murderess soon after the crime. Frenetic in its pacing and bursting with pride and love for Andrew, the film zips across the world in search of a comprehensive portrait of the man’s life. As the girlfriend’s extradition proceedings crawl along concurrently, the director discovers a legion of people who adored Andrew, as well as unexpected dimensions to his life (Kuenne had no idea he was an amateur photographer.) The film’s hiccups are essentially stylistic, including a histrionic and sneering tone to the true crime elements that undercuts Dear Zachary’s naked humanity. Still, can you blame Kuenne? His closeness to the story is both its weakness and the key to its power.

Slumdog Millionaire
2008 (UK / USA)
Directors: Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan

Perhaps it’s the black-hearted cynic in me, but I no longer accept notions of true love and destiny built on little more than airy invocations. So it is with Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan’s Slumdog Millionaire, a relatively conventional–even predictable–Dickensian tale told with ingenuity, ferocity, and heaps of seductive style. Boyle and Tandan assert that Mumbai orphans Jamal (Dev Patel) and Latika (Freida Pinto) were Meant For Each Other, but we need a reason to believe it beyond their assertion. No matter. While a paucity of authentic connection is its conspicuous flaw, Slumdog’s triumph is the sheer spirit of its cinematic language. The bulk of the film is told in Kane-style flashback, as Jamal explains how he managed to breeze his way to the final question on a Hindi quiz show. Boyle and Loveleen’s approach is one of limitless energy, whether dealing in the currency of fear, confusion, despair, or pure zest for life. Despite its narrative problems–including a couple of character turns utterly bereft of motivation–Slumdog offers a tantalizing rebuttal to the Great Man theory of hstory, as evidenced by its repeated references to such luminaries. Sometimes someone is just in the right place at the right time.

Alone
2007 (Thailand)
Directors: Banjong Pisanthanakun and Parkpoom Wongpoom

I suppose it’s flogging the obvious to suggest that the rhythms and aesthetic of contemporary Asian horror are way, way past their freshness date. The essential question that one has to ask about the Thai conjoined-twin chiller Alone, then, is whether it offers anything unexpected at all. The answer is a half-hearted affirmative, if only because writer-directors Banjong Pisanthanakun and Parkpoom Wongpoom, for all their drifting in familiar gothic doldrums, have crafted a story with some novel, savage sucker-punches. Pim (Marsha Wattanapanich), the adult survivor of a pair of twins, returns to her family home, where menacing visions of her departed sister bedevil her dreams and waking hours alike. Alone’s gruesome phantasms–applied in a mind-numbing and seemingly endless pattern of lull-shock-lull–are derivative, never truly scaring on a level beyond simplistic campfire jumpiness. The film’s modest success rests on the cleverness of its narrative twists. Pisanthanakun and Wongpoom rely on hoary stagecraft to pull off their tricks–we watch a whirl of handkerchiefs while they pick our pockets–but it’s a well-earned illusion, one that seems plucked from a superior installment of Night Gallery. On balance, it’s just barely worth the musty wrapping paper.