(My) first day at VIFF 2022: Tori and Lokita, Thunder, and Nightsiren, plus how not to piss off fellow audience members with your crinkly plastic shit

 Nightsiren

So my worries about my health abated a bit and I was finally able to see some VIFF films in theatres, today. It was great to get out to International Village and the VIFF Centre, and today, if timing works out, I'll be at the Rio (for Something n the Dirt) and the Vancouver Playhouse (for EO).

Tori and Lokita (which has ended its VIFF run, but hopefully will find its way back to Vancouver soon) is another great Dardenne brothers film - Belgian Catholics with a highly compassionate eye and a gift for elegant, simple, but morally significant and powerfully moving storytelling. They are filmmakers who are setting out to make a difference in the world, which is always something I admire; I've liked all four of the films of theirs that I've seen (L'Enfant, The Silence of Lorna, Kid on a Bike, and this one). Their attempt this time out seems to be to influence the bureaucracy around immigration, to make it more compassionate (and less, uh, bureaucratic) and to that end, we are brought to identify with two African youths - the girl, Lokita, is a bit older than the boy - who look out for each other through thick and thin, while trying to negotiate a complex web of circumstances. Most pressingly, the authorities won't give Lokita working papers, because they don't believe she is actually related to the legit refugee Tori (the program guide for the VIFF spills the the truth about their relationship but thus ruins whatever slight suspense is generated by the ambiguity here). She aspires to be a care aid, so she can send money home to Mom, who suspects - when the money is not forthcoming - that she is spending it on herself, but in fact. the criminals who helped smuggle her into Belgium are trying to shake her down for the same money; and her only way, since she's an illegal, to make cash to meet the expectations on her and avoid getting killed by the smugglers is by selling drugs for her sleazeball chef boss. There's more, and worse, but the details don't need spilling here: suffice to say that it's quite a desperate web she's caught in (I was reminded of the New Model Army's powerful song "Another Imperial Day," which touches on some of the same issues). I've worked with a fair share of refugees in my day, as an ESL teacher and tutor, and found most of them to be highly moral, intelligent, and hard-working people, very grateful for their new lives in Canada, more appreciative of their opportunities than a lot of native-born Canadians, and I've never really understood the hatred one sometimes sees directed at them. I found the film powerful, believable, and compelling.   

One thing that irritated me, though, both about this and the next film I saw today, Thunder, was that both films involve songs being sung, especially Tori and Lokita, and in neither case were subtitles provided for the lyrics. I've noticed this before on other foreign films and never understood it, since often songs that appear in movies are lyrically significant, reflecting aspects of the theme. Tori and Lokita actually ENDS on a song -  one the two main characters sing to each other more than once in the film - and yet not one word was translated. How is it that this should be a routine phenomenon? Could someone send a memo to someone about this?

I liked Thunder - or at least the portions I was awake for. (Sadly, it too has passed, but again, there are usually some repeats at the end of the festival, added screenings at the VIFF Centre on Seymour at Davie, and who knows what will get picked up for distributon afterwards). The story deals with a young woman being persecuted for quite ordinary sexual behaviour in the French countryside, circa 1900. It's one of these very visually beautiful, but very minimal and quiet films that seem to have the effect of inspiring intense concentration, so much so that I actually broke my usual rule of tolerance and asked the woman next to me to stop rustling in her plastic bag of candies, which she'd dug out of her backpack after the film had started, spent what felt like an eternity getting open, and was just making altogether too much noise with, in a highly protracted, "being-noisy-while-trying-hard-to-seem-like-I-am-being-quiet" way that just never ended. Rustle rustle rustle rustle rustle; crinkle crinkle crinkle crinkle crinkle. On and on, with no end in sight.  

Look: if you're gonna smuggle outside food into a screening: 

a) smuggle something that is not individually wrapped candies in a crinkly plastic bag

b) just be ballsy enough to discreetly dig it out, open it up, and have it ready for consumption before the movie starts (that's what I did! I had lozenges for my throat problem, dug out my bag, popped out of the blister pack, and tucked into my pocket for noiseless consumption. It really is not that hard to do).

c) try to be sensitive to what's going on onscreen, and don't commence rustling during quiet stuff (alas, all of Thunder was quiet)

d) and once you DO start eating your smuggled-in treats, don't draw the process out to torturous lengths so that people have to stew in impatience listening to you and missing the film because they're distracted by how annoyed they are. Crinkling and rustling for fifteen minutes when you could just quickly and efficiently pop something in your mouth and be done with it is not doing anyone a favour. 

Anyhow, having looked over at her and made an annoyed comment, I then became really self-conscious about how the effort of concentrating on the film - it really does provoke intense focus - wore me out sufficiently to put me to sleep within half an hour. I kept jolting up out of a half-snooze, trying to make sense of what was going on, then falling back asleep again for a few minutes. And, lord help me, did I snore? I certainly gave "the crinkler" ammunition to make her own annoyed comment to me, if so, and I kept waking up in a state of fear, but, uh, I guess she was classier than I was, because I just kept jolting out of sleep and returning to it for about 45 minutes of the film, snoring or not snoring, I dunno. When I finally came to, as the villagers were accusing the girl of being in league with the Devil, I had no real idea what she'd been caught doing, save that it involved sexual expression. With whom? What form did it take? No clue.  

It occured to me that I could ask the crinkler, "What did I miss?" - but I held myself in check.   

Still, what I was awake for, I quite liked. My favourite scene in the film (of the ones I was awake for) was her spying on a trio of young men jerking off together. I'm pretty sure she ended up fucking some of them? It was nothing groundbreaking, but it was, as I say, visually compelling, so if you like quiet, minimal films with gorgeous photography, mostly of landscapes, I do recommend it. 

Try not to snore. 

Truth is, I enjoyed Nightsiren more (and good news - it screens again October 8th!). The title is a bit odd and goes unexplained, and seems like it might have been the invention of the English-language distributors: compared to the sort of seductive exoticism that title sets you up for, it's actually a fairly pissed-off feminist film, in which young women are, once again, persecuted for fairly normal behaviour, but this time, instead of the persecutors being zealous, pious, sexually repressed and self-righteous Christians (as in Thunder), they are whatever the Slovakian equivalent is of rednecks. In fact, the male characters are a bit much, given to beating their wives and their children, drinking, making sexist comments, and projecting all the evils of the world onto the women around them, especially the central character, who is accused of witchcraft. 

Which brings us to a bit of a confusing point for me: do the Slovakian working classes actually believe in witchcraft to the extent that we see here? To some extent it is clear in the film that superstitions are being weaponized to give ammunition to people who have their own agendas, often involving deflecting blame for their own failings (as with the aforesaid wife-beaters, who are also kind of rapey: real charmers, in short). But there is a scene where a female character, in cutting open a goose, finds a live frog, and concludes not that the goose must have swallowed the frog, but that the frog was PUT in the goose by the film's protagonist via witchcraft. So much for Occam's Razor: some of the conclusions the characters come to seem so backwards and ill-informed that I found myself thinking of Hostel, which I previously wrote about in regard to my review of the other Slovakian film I've seen this year, The Killing of a Journalist.  One gathers that some Slovakians were upset about the depiction of their country that Eli Roth offered in the first two Hostel movies, but dig: Nightsiren - MADE BY SLOVAKIANS - makes Slovakians (some of them, anyhow) seem far worse. The evilest people in the Hostel franchise would be more welcome at my dinner table than half the characters in Nightsiren. The guy with the dogs, who runs the whole torture-for-money operation would be Mr. Personality by comparison with the dipshits in this movie, which treats its rural poor with about the same degree of affection and sympathy as you see in, for instance, Calvaire. 

I do know people - sensitive to misandry in the name of "politically correct" cinema - who I wouldn't recommend Nightsiren to, but I would recommend it to anyone with a taste for feminist horror (the co-authors and director are female, note). There were a few plot points I got puzzled by, a few characters I couldn't keep straight - there is a slightly tangled backstory and a tendency to jump around in time - but there were lots of things I really liked about the film, including a pretty intriguing "trip" sequence, some nicely non-exploitive, pleasing-to-the-eye sexuality (for a feminist film, there sure are lots of boobs in it!), and, uh, lots of snakes! I like snakes (tho' I doubt these were the native snakes of Slovakia, which would have been even better). The weirdest part of the whole screening for me was the trigger warning that they read to us at the beginning of the film that there was - shit, I forget what they said, but it was something like "depictions of gender prejudice" or something, which led me to think that the film would take in transphobia, which it doesn't (how about a nice, unambiguous "depictions of hatred and violence towards women?") The weirdest thing about that is, tho', I do think at least one animal might have been harmed during the making of the film; they COULD have faked the snake death, I guess, but it sure looked like they were slitting the throat of a goose and plucking its feathers. Which I don't object to seeing, in fact - I mean, probably a dozen birds have died this last week in the name of feeding me; I'm sure the goose got eaten, too. But to me, fake depictions of violence against women are part and parcel of watching a horror movie, while, y'know, seeing an animal die a real death onscreen is something I wouldn't mind a heads up about. 

Maybe I just don't understand trigger warnings. 

Anyhow, that's all I got to take in today; The Banshees of Inisherin was lined up around the block for its sole screening, so there was no chance for me to see it; it's ended its run, so let's hope it shows up in theatres as soon as the fest is over. I considered Christian Mungiu's RMN instead - it sounds great and came with a friend's recommendation - but it wasn't starting for twenty minutes, ran late, and I wanted to come back here and jot my thoughts down about the films I'd already seen. 

Hoping to lure Erika out to Triangle of Sadness, the new Ruben Ostlund film (Force Majeure, The Square) later this week - but tomorrow, it looks like my VIFFing will be confined to Something in the Dirt and EO. 

 See you at the movies?