VIFF Previews #1: Sick of Myself, Zeb's Spider, Maigret, Women Talking, and the new documentary from the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab

So the VIFF schedule is now online. I always do a fast peruse to see what I might be excited to catch or write about, mostly looking at director's names, sometimes noting special events, and basically requesting media screeners for anything and everything in the Altered States series, which is the go-to section of the festival for people with an investment in horror, cult cinema, taboo-busting transgression, or flights of extremity (not my sole areas of interest, but certainly ground I have found fertile over the years). The three films I was most excited to learn of, off the bat, are Patrice Leconte's new Georges Simenon adaptation, Maigret, starring Gerard Depardieu; Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor's De Humani Corporis Fabrica, which is the new film out of the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab; and Sarah Polley's Women Talking. Bearing in mind that I have not seen these films yet - and in some cases may not until after the festival starts, as not every film has a media screener and some screeners are a bad match for my present tech situation - some notes on each may be in order. 

Maigret: Patrice Leconte is a French filmmaker active since the 1970s, known for finely-crafted films that are associated with arthouse cinema in North America, because they're French, but which have also had a significant commercial reception internationally; he's probably best known in North America for The Man on the Train, The Hairdresser's Husband, Ridicule, and Monsieur Hire. For his new feature - his 31st that is neither a short nor a segment of another film, if my count is correct - Leconte has adapted a Maigret novel, Maigret and the Dead Girl, starring Gerard Depardieu in the title character's role. I have never seen any film (or read any books) involving this famed French detective, but I have long heard that Simenon's best novels rank up there with classics of American hardboiled/ noir fiction; and there are two Georges Simenon film adaptations that I have enjoyed immensely. One is Bela Tarr's The Man from London, which I caught at a past VIFF; the deliberate extreme slowness of the storytelling, the minimalism in terms of dialogue, and the sumptuous black and white photography will separate the serious scopophiles from the masses, but are more features of Tarr than Simenon, and I think the film was of more interest to people who had seen and enjoyed other Tarr films, curious to see what he would do entering the world of genre filmmaking; the film plays, as I recall, rather like a European arthouse variant on the "trouble caused by found money" theme seen also in Sam Raimi's A Simple Plan and the Coens' No Country for Old Men.  

Michel Blanc and Sandrine Bonnaire in Monsieur Hire

The other Simenon adaptation I've enjoyed is also a Patrice Leconte film, the aforesaid Monsieur Hire, about a reclusive, refined tailor with a (refined, non-masturbatory, but still pretty creepy) voyeuristic obsession on his  pretty female neighbour; he ends up a suspect in the murder of a different young girl, and definitely has secrets to keep, but there are some rather large reveals as the story progresses, so it's best I say no more. I saw that film a good half-dozen times when it came out, including a screening where I found myself the only patron of a luxurious older movie theatre in the bookstore district in Bellingham back in 1989 - one of the greatest cinematic experiences of my youth, indeed of my life; I felt like Leonard Cohen in that poem about the bus ride - all of this technology and opulence just for me! A later film of Leconte's, The Hairdresser's Husband, combined with Monsieur Hire, made me wonder if there was, in fact, a streak of misogyny in Leconte, but for reasons unclear, that seems a fairly common trait in highly controlling, artful male filmmakers (Hitchcock, Kubrick...). 

Anyhow, I'm very excited to see Maigret! 

As for the new Paravel/ Castaing-Taylor film, De Humani Corporis Fabrica - "on the fabric of the human body" - I'm actually more frightened of seeing it than I am excited, because the last film I saw of theirs, Caniba, which I reviewed here, was by far the most horrifying/ disturbing/ gag-inducing film I have ever seen: longer than "The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes," vastly more worthy of serious consideration than the repugnant exploitation of vulgar crap like Cannibal Holocaust, and about as unwholesome a tale of brotherly relations as you find in Terry Zwigoff's Crumb, the film tells the true story of Issei Sagawa, an obsessive, disturbed Japanese art student in France who developed a fetishistic obsession on a female fellow student, You can and should skip to the next paragraph if you are sensitive or squeamish: as an expression of his his erotic fascination, Sagawa invited this unfortunate girl - Renée Hartevelt - to his apartment, where he murdered and ate her, storing pieces of her for consumption over the next few days. I forget if he had actual sex with any of the parts but it seems possible; forgive me if I cannot bear to read about it again. Briefly imprisoned in Paris, Sagawa found himself the beneficiary of bureaucratic loopholes (possibly aided by his coming from a connected or wealthy family) - that saw him return to Japan essentially a free man. He had difficulty finding employ after what he had done, so he opted for the next best thing: milked his crime for celebrity, appearing on television (mostly as a commentator on crime stories, but also in, I gather, a steakhouse commercial - the equivalent of Ed Gein advertising leatherwork. People who think I have a dark sense of humour should go spend some time in Japan) . He also wrote and illustrated a truly obscene manga, shown liberally in the film, that described his crime. Sometimes when a film is repugnant and hard to watch - the August Underground films, for instance - I just turn it off or walk out, but Caniba is serious enough, and about a story I have sufficient interest in (having lived for three years in Japan, knowing that Sagawa was out there somewhere; plus I even own the Rolling Stones album where Sagawa gets a mention, in the song "Too Much Blood") that I stuck it out, but it made me want to vomit at times, to be honest. 

They seem like such nice people!

The other Paravel and Castaing-Taylor film that I have seen was far easier to watch was a fascinating depiction of time on a fishing trawler, Leviathan, which - shot in part on Go Pro cameras, which float among the fish heads and drag behind the boat with the seagulls, among other things - gets my vote for "greatest shakycam movie ever made." I interviewed the filmmakers for CineAction about the film, as part of feature I wrote about films that include slaughterhouse footage (sadly, I missed my chance to include Zev Asher's Casuistry: The Art of Killing a Cat in the article, which deals with slaughterhouses in part, but has no footage of them, but more on on that here. See also my giant interview with Zev, done the last time I saw him in Vancouver, here).

Press still for De Humani Corporis Fabrica

Anyhow, with a sickening film about a cannibal killer and a fascinating but at times gory doc where you get to bob and swirl in bloody water with the severed heads of fish, one cannot but wonder what will happen when Castaing-Taylor and Paravel turn their attentions and innovative filmmaking techniques to the human body, the internal workings of which are usually hidden behind taboos so deep and profound that we seldom even realize they exist. And clearly the last few years of my life - in which I have been treated for a massive infection of my foot, pissed blood for months due to a kidney stone stent, had pieces of my tongue cut out (four times now), had patches of my wrist skin removed (from both wrists, after the first graft failed) to rebuild said tongue, patches of my thigh skin removed to cover my wrists, both forearms slit open to harvest veins and arteries for use in the flap (the graft), my neck dissected - slit open from ear to larynx, basically - to harvest lymph nodes and saliva glands for biopsy, and had a tracheostomy to boot - make me the perfect man to watch and review this film, which does indeed dwell, the guide says, on "the abject horror of open surgery" (yikes!), the surprising beauty of medical imaging, and possibly muchmore besides (I have an interview request in but it's got to happen via email, given my current computer failure; I will not hold it against them if they decline) . 

Frankly, as someone who has occasionally fainted at the sight of blood, I do not exactly want to see De Humani Corporis Fabrica, after Caniba. I am a bit afraid even to read about it (though you can, if you like, here - a Slant Magazine feature). But given my history with the filmmakers, my recent life experiences, and the importance of the work of the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab, which I have profound respect for - some of the  most innovative and powerful documentary filmmaking going on at present - I feel like I must see it, must write about it. I'll be sure to let you know if I barf - though know in advance that I will be barfing in praise. There *is* a screener coming my way, apparently. We shall see what we see (with our own eyes, so to speak). 

Finally, in terms of films I am keen to see, but cannot preview, Sarah Polley has adapted Miriam Toews novel Women Talking. Not sure if the title is in any way a reference to the Bechdel test (I hope it is!). If I know that I want to see a film based on the names or themes, I prefer not to read about it until after I have seen it, so all I can say about this film is that a) I have always enjoyed the work of Sarah Polley, who I know best as an actor; b) esteemed Vancouver songwriter Art Bergmann, when I asked him what novelists he read and admired, named Toews first; and c) the book rather surprisingly appeared on a CrimeReads list of the "most genuinely terrifying novels ever written," alongside two other books I am afraid to read (The Consumer by Michael Gira and The Girl Next Door by Jack Ketchum), and one that I probably won't read, but the film adaptation of which - Polanski's The Tenant - I have always admired. Add to all this that the film is being described as #MeToo among the Mennonites, and it becomes a festival must-watch: if I read anything further about the film before its VIFF debut, it will be Toews' novel itself. 

So that's it in terms of writing about movies I have NOT seen. We will now turn to my VIFF preview #1: Sick of Myself  

Sick of Myself - receiving its Canadian premiere at the VIFF on October 6th and 9th - plays sort of like what would happen if Lars von Trier (or perhaps Joachim Trier?)  remade Todd Haynes' Safe as a black comedy. About the lengths people will go to get attention, the film is dark enough that it even has a joke, albeit a small one, about someone on a shooting rampage, which, given the film is coming out of the country that gave us Anders Behring Breivik, is a bit brave, really (Todd Solondz' Happiness also comes to mind as a touchpoint, or perhaps even Yorgos Lanthimos' The Lobster; fans of those films should find themselves right at home in the audience for this one). It's about a woman who deliberately abuses a drug known to cause a severe and disfiguring skin condition, so that she can use the condition to compete with her rising art-star boyfriend, whose art consists of ripping off furniture and recontextualizing it in galleries (which reminds me of a friend of mine in a local band used to steal things about the city to use in his art, but it's probably for the best if I don't mention his name! Some of you will know who I mean). 

Sick of Myself might piss some people off, might push some buttons - especially if you find yourself a target for its barbs - especially a scene in which the protagonist, Signe, attends a self-help group and a fellow member of the group dismisses Signe as being unworthy of serious attention because her condition is physically demonstrable, visible on her skin, and thus not subject to the same mistrust and accusation that greets sufferers of fibromyalgia, brain fog, migraines or so forth. I could see people reading between the lines that filmmaker Krisoffer Borgli is implying that these conditions, too, are suspect, brought on by their sufferers as a result of attention-seeking behaviour. At least in Safe it is clear that, whatever is wrong with Julianne Moore's character, Haynes is on her side, feels compassion for her, is even proud of her for sticking to her guns ("it's the chemicals!").

Sick of Myself might also have pissed of the makers of the drug Signe abuses - Lidexol, whose website claims they have sent a cease and desist order to the filmmakers for misrepresenting their product... but it seems likely this is actually a bit of Blair Witchery on the part of the film's marketing department. But Sick of Myself works very well as a critique of our willingness to pimp out our tragedies and traumas on social media for cheap attention. There's more horror - often quite gross, enough that several reviews mention Cronenberg - than there is laugh-out loud comedy, though I did in fact laugh out loud in surprise and delight at a couple of moments.... ut, like, I've seen Happiness at least half a dozen times, think of it (after you get through the fear on first viewing that it is not okay to be laughing at any of this) as one of the funniest films ever made, so....

I wonder if Signe's name means "sign," in Norwegian? You won't actually like her, or Thomas, or any of the film's characters, very much, but if you allow yourself to read them as signifiers of your own willingness to exploit your suffering for attention - as a sort of critique of the human condition, at present - you'll find a lot to like here. Pimping out my own recent tragedies - from the recent death of my cat to my cancer surgeries last September and December - on this very blog, and recognizing some of Signe's more comical behaviours, like taking photos of herself in a hospital mirror, I had already been thinking that there was something suspect about my desire for online attention and validation, already been contemplating detoxing from Facebook ("maybe it's a good thing my computer has crashed?"). Might be a good cautionary tale to make teenagers watch before getting Facebook accounts, eating Tide Pods, or going on shooting rampages (Makes more sense than the field trip I found myself a part of for the VIFF screening of Let the Right One In, because the teacher had heard that bullying was a theme...). 

More information about Sick of Myself on the VIFF website...

VIFF preview #2: Zeb's Spider

Speaking of cats, there's a cat that's part of the plot of the Vancouver short Zeb's Spider, a highly-detailed stop-motion animation, less than ten minutes long, about a reclusive person with a talismanic fixation on horseshoes and wishbones (and perhaps some mental health issues; the film kind of reminded me of Ryan in that regard). Zeb is at first is terrified by a spider that appears in her  apartment, but then basically gives it its own room, feeding it flies, while ignoring the harmless alleycat that lives outside her window. There is not much else I can say about a film so short without spoiling it - it reminded me of one of my favourite-ever actual nightmares, in which I was the janitor in a building charged with going into a certain basement room and exorcising it every night, lest bad things happen -  but I was startled when the credits rolled to realize that Zeb was voiced by Vancouver's own Frazey Ford, of whom my wife and I are both fans (her video for "Done" is one of the greatest rock videos, maybe the greatest rock video, ever filmed in Vancouver). Frazey doesn't do much more than mutter occasionally - I'm presuming she is friendly with either Alicia Eisen or Sophie Jarvis, the filmmakers, since it would be otherwise rather odd for her to seek her acting debut as a voice actor in a film that the program guide itself says is "without dialogue" - but fans of Frazey's still might want to check the film out, since it is compassionate, interestingly-realized, and oddly memorable. It is playing as a short feature in front of the Spanish language film Huesera, which I have not yet seen, but sounds like a very appropriate compliment (see the link for a description). 

That's all for now! More VIFF blogging to come...!