Sydney Film Festival Day 4: Of Mattresses and Men (and Women)

It's Monday the 11th; the festival's just kicked in and I'm already blogged out... but let's get to it...

Every film festival has them - movies that you're not going to see anywhere else... that is until the DVD comes out.
Tsai Ming Liang is a filmmaker who seems to work exclusively for the festival circuit. I have never seen any of his films released in Australia commercially. And I doubt they get released anywhere else. He's just the antithesis of everything that popular cinema stands for... fast and cheap thrills, facile emotions, visceral pleasures.
So it's no wonder that I put his latest opus 'I Don't Want To Sleep Alone' on top my "must see" list. It's Liang's first film set in his native Kuala Lampur - a liminal place that seems to register on the world map as a transfer point between the north and south hemispheres. Appropriately Liang delves in the rampant multi-culturalism of this city, with his characteristic wide-eyed objectivity. From frame one, we feel the absolute rawness of the place. The drab colours, the depressing dilapidation of half-finished construction sites, the babyloniasm of it all... amidst which Liang's camera picks up his protagonists in a pattern that seems resolutely random only to turn out to be celestial. The plot "wanders" around a homeless Chinese man who is severely beaten up (in the hilarious opening scene) by some thugs and is then picked by a local construction worker who then proceeds to almost religiously look after him for no apparent reason. Then there is a young restaurant hostess who is forced to look after her proprietresses' comatose son. And then there's the central character: the mattress. That's right, I'm completely serious.
Throughout the film there's practically not a single verbal exchange between any of the characters. Words are rendered ineffectual in Liang's universe, never more so than here. They just stare at each other for a while, then follow each other for a while, then make an occasional but telling gesture, then either walk away or lie still staring at the ceiling. This strange, Keatonesque atmosphere permeated the theater itself. Pure silence; yet I was laughing hysterically without making a single sound. The director is able to do wonders with the most banal of situations, to draw out humour and poignancy out of the ordinary by the sheer audacity of his timing and meticulous choreography. For this film is nothing if not a dance: a cinematic quartet of pas de deuxs that is exquisitely poetic and at times soaringly sensual.
While Liang's earlier film "Good bye Dragon Inn" (2003) was defiantly challenging in its temporal and spatial experiments that lead to near-abstraction, his latest masterpiece is much more humanist and emotionally rewarding. The early scenes of bodies (actually a single body) being washed and groomed in real time are painfully confrontational in their unflinching reality, testing our own limits of endurance when it comes to caring for other people's needs. But of course its much more than that. The film transcends the banality of sex to speak volumes about our need for contact and a sense of proximity. The bare intimacy of it all - physical and emotional - is sometimes so powerful as to be uncomfortable yet by then end of the last scene proves to be nothing short of cathartic. Ok... I feel myself floating away with all the gashing superlatives, so just for the touchdown I'd like to say that this is my film-revelation of 2007 so far.

I also somehow squeezed in the second showing of 'A Walk Into the Sea' and I'm glad to report that the experience proved worthwhile. The hitherto unknown figure of Danny Williams - one of the periodic victims of Andy Warhol's Factory is unknown no more. This documentary is a fascinating semi-expose of what went on in Warhol's silver-foil cocoon and how it affected a young and extremely talented filmmaker. Williams disappeared when he was 27, presumably due to suicide, although his body was never found. For a couple of years he was Warhol's live-in boyfriend and was graciously lent the valuable Bolex camera that allow him to shoot two dozen highly original experimental films. No one saw the film until their recent discover and more crucially no one seemed to remember Danny making them - even while they were starring in it. While Esther Robinson's documentary is only rudimentary and occasionally annoying in its cloying techniques, it is full of fascinating interviews with many survivors of the Warhol era and more importantly has clips from Williams' films which are to say the least - revelatory. This is a must see for anyone interested in the period and in American avant-gard cinema in general.

The last film of the day was Manoel de Oliveira's tribute to one of the greatest films ever made - Bunuel's 'Belle du Jour' - appropriately titled 'Belle Toujours'. The film is basically a sequel of sorts... 38 years after the original film finished Henri Husson sees Severine in the opera and proceeds to chase after her through Paris. She finally agrees to meet him for dinner claiming that she only wants one thing... to know whether her husband was told or not. Those of you who know the original film, will know what a crucial question this is. It's this kind of, perfectly flimsy, premise that many of Oliveira's existentialist fables are constructed around. I must admit I've never quite warmed to this auteur's films, with the exception of 'The Convent' (1994) - an utterly strange, almost silly, philosophical parable which starred the original Belle de Jour - Catherine Deneuve. In this film, Bullie Oglier takes on the reigns as the aged, but still enticing, Severine. She manages to retain a lot of the cold mystery that Deneuve projected in her role. Piccoli huffs and puffs through his role, at times seeming like he's going to have a heart attack. But sadly, the whole affair is quite grating and masturbatory. It's the epitome of antiquated bourgeois film making that for some reason refuses to die a dignified death. The director's bizarre casting choices for the secondary roles make this almost painful to watch, especially in the first half. And the astoundingly superficial "insights" the characters come up with, seem to have been drawn from a "How To Read Freud" textbook for high school students. The final "dinner" is however quite light and deadpan and the pay off is surprising, appropriately absurd and infuriating (it has to do with length, a box and a rooster). At least Oliveira stayed true to Bunuel's spirit. And you gotta give it to him - he's nearing 100 and is still making cerebral comedies. Respect!