Thursday, April 3, 2008

Young@Heart

by James McNally on April 3, 2008 · 1 comment

in Doc Soup,Documentaries,Film Festivals

Young@Heart
Editor’s Note: Doc Soup is a monthly doc­u­mentary screening pro­gramme run by the good folks at Hot Docs. It gives audi­ences in Toronto (and now Calgary and Vancouver!) their reg­ular doc fix each year from the fall through to the spring, leading up to the Hot Docs fest­ival itself.
Editor’s Note: The fol­lowing review con­tains what some may con­sider a SPOILER. To avoid affecting the filmgoing exper­i­ence for you, gentle reader, I’ve applied white text col­ouring to the spoiler sec­tion. If you want to read it, just click and drag your mouse over the blank area. For those reading the RSS feed, you’ll just have to avoid reading this entry before you’ve seen the film.

Young@Heart (2007, Director: Stephen Walker): It would be almost impossible to make a bad film about the Young@Heart Chorus, a group of senior cit­izens in Northampton, Massachusetts whose rep­er­toire includes songs by The Ramones, The Clash, Coldplay and Sonic Youth. Stephen Walker’s film is a genuine crowd-pleaser, with scenes of great emo­tional intensity and some unfor­get­table char­ac­ters, and was a great choice to close out this season of Doc Soup. When musical dir­ector Bob Cilman began working with the group in 1982, their rep­er­toire was mostly vaudeville stuff, but over the years he’s added more and more con­tem­porary music. Though choir mem­bers aren’t often familiar with the songs and in many cases, don’t even like them, by the time they’ve learned them, they end up bringing some­thing unique to their inter­pret­a­tions. One of the clever touches of Walker’s film is the inser­tion of sev­eral “videos” shot for songs like the Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Sedated” and the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive.”

Apart from the videos (shot at Cilman’s insist­ence because he said he never saw old people in music videos), the rest of the film fol­lows a tried-and-true format, fol­lowing the choir through sev­eral weeks of rehearsals before a new show. We get to see the pro­cess of learning new material, and it often goes hil­ari­ously wrong. Some of the choir mem­bers are a bit deaf, or need large-print ver­sions of the lyric sheets. Others can’t figure out how to play com­pact discs. And some just don’t seem very musical at all. But as Walker’s camera fol­lows them around, we get to know them, and we realize how much this cre­ative outlet means to them.

One of Cilman’s ini­ti­at­ives for the new show is to bring back two mem­bers who’d recently had to stop per­forming due to health prob­lems and have them sing a duet of the Coldplay song “Fix You.” But things take an unex­pected (or per­haps only a half-expected) turn when one of them dies, and by the time Fred Knittle sits down on a chair holding his oxygen tank to sing it alone, the lump in my throat was growing. Though his voice is strong and the rendi­tion beau­tiful, it was the off-kilter beat provided by the oxygen machine that made the song so heart­breaking. That and the lyrics:
And the tears come streaming down your face
When you lose some­thing you can’t replace
When you love someone but it goes to waste
Could it be worse?

Lights will guide you home
And ignite your bones
And I will try to fix you

Mortality is the one thing that none of us can “fix” and I’m glad the film reminded us of that. This is some­thing that senior cit­izens face every day, as they watch their friends and loved ones pass on around them, and wonder when their time will come. Their courage and accept­ance in the face of such tragedy, their determ­in­a­tion to live every moment, and their simple joy in per­forming were inspiring and infectious.

If I have any com­plaints about the film, they have nothing to do with the story. But I did feel that Walker was a little too present in the film, from his intrusive nar­ra­tion to his insist­ence on talking off-camera to his on-camera sub­jects. I really enjoyed meeting these fas­cin­ating people and watching how the show is pro­duced and rehearsed, but I didn’t enjoy hearing so much about Stephen Walker, though I’m sure he’s a nice chap.

Here is the Q&A with dir­ector Stephen Walker along with Bob Cilman and some of the choir mem­bers from after the screening:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Duration: 18:25

Official Site

Official Site for the Young@Heart Chorus

8/10(8/10)

Tagged as: aging, music

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Water Lilies (Naissance des Pieuvres)

by James McNally on April 3, 2008

in Cinéfranco,Film Festivals

Water Lilies (Naissance des Pieuvres)

Water Lilies (Naissance des Pieuvres) (2007, Director: Céline Sciamma): I ori­gin­ally wrote about this film way back in August 2007, anti­cip­ating its screening at TIFF. For some reason, I wasn’t able to see it then, so when I saw it in the Cinéfranco lineup, I vowed not to miss it again. And I’m so glad that I didn’t. Céline Sciamma’s dir­ect­orial debut is a deeply affecting and beau­tiful film about adoles­cence: body image, hor­mones, self-esteem, friend­ship, loy­alty, crushes, sexual con­fu­sion, con­formity. Though it’s never “about” any of these, it says a lot about them. But it’s not a film of grand ges­tures. Instead, it’s a very small, very per­sonal film that res­on­ates well beyond its seem­ingly narrow scope.

It’s summer in an unnamed French suburb. Skinny undeveloped tomboy Marie (Pauline Acquart) goes to the local pool to see her chubby friend Anne (Louise Blachère) per­form in a syn­chron­ized swim­ming event. While there, she is mes­mer­ized by the cap­tain of the team, gor­geous blonde Floriane (Adele Haenel). She develops a major crush that becomes an obses­sion, and aban­dons Anne to pursue Floriane. Insinuating her­self into Floriane’s life by doing favours, she is soon able to watch the team prac­tice and even travel to per­form­ances with them. Though it’s obvious that Marie has romantic feel­ings for Floriane, she is unable to say any­thing for fear of rejec­tion. Instead, she lets Floriane use her to sneak out of the house to meet boys, causing Marie no end of anguish. Meanwhile, Anne has fallen hard for one of the boys on the water polo team, even though he’s des­per­ately trying to bed Floriane him­self. Floriane is just enough of a cypher to cause heartache every­where she goes, using her flir­ta­tious­ness as a defence mech­anism to hide her own sexual con­fu­sion and fear. Though this leaves Marie con­fused and heart­broken, she dis­plays a core of tough­ness that will carry her through. Her friend­ship with Anne is also deeper than it first appears, and the two out­siders by the end seem much stronger than the sup­posed “normal” pretty girl.

The set­ting among a team of syn­chron­ized swim­mers is a stroke of genius. Back in the fall, I read a few reviews of the film, and I can’t remember where I read it, but I’m stealing the idea non­ethe­less. A critic stated that syn­chron­ized swim­ming was the per­fect meta­phor for adoles­cence. Smiling and beau­tiful on the sur­face, but under the water, legs churning like mad to stay afloat. I also liked the idea that, like gym­nasts or ballet dan­cers, there is one par­tic­ular body type that is required, and anyone else is rejected. The hair and makeup also make the swim­mers indis­tin­guish­able, since they are all expected to func­tion as part of a greater entity, almost mech­an­ical in its pre­ci­sion. It’s obvious that Marie and Anne don’t fit into this world, but they are mag­net­ic­ally drawn to it anyway. The absence of any adults or any spe­cifics that would place the story into a par­tic­ular time help to rein­force the insu­larity of this time in their lives, and there­fore its intensity.

As I said in my pre­view, the film reminded me a lot of Lukas Moodysson’s Show Me Love (1998), and there is even a phys­ical resemb­lance between the two female pair­ings. Just as in that film, the dir­ector handles the del­icacy of first love with great sens­it­ivity, and focuses on how the tiniest of actions or ges­tures can have great sig­ni­fic­ance. Sciamma coaxes incred­ibly brave per­form­ances from her three young actors, and the cine­ma­to­graphy rein­forces how beauty is intens­i­fied by vul­ner­ab­ility. Though it’s a hoary old cliché, since this is a first film, there is most def­in­itely a lot of Céline Sciamma’s own exper­i­ence on the screen. I’m des­per­ately hoping she has a lot more to say.

Trailer
Official Site
Interview with dir­ector Céline Sciamma

9/10(9/10)

Tagged as: #cinefranco08, adolescence, coming-of-age, france, homosexuality

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