Tuesday, May 25, 2010

The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister

by Robert Bell on May 25, 2010

in Film Festivals,Inside Out

The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister
The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister screens as Inside Out’s Closing Gala on Sunday May 30 at 7:30pm at the Bloor Cinema. Buy tickets here.

The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister (Director: James Kent): I think my favourite part of The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister, the BBC biopic about the tit­ular 19th cen­tury Yorkshire indus­tri­alist, is that during the cli­mactic romantic moment when our heroine wins the affec­tions of a suit­able mate and leans in for the kiss, she quickly fol­lows this up by lifting up her lover’s dress and giving her a quick finger-bang. Now if we could just slip some­thing like that into a Jane Austen adaptation…

It doesn’t come off quite as shock­ingly as it sounds, given that Miss Lister (Maxine Peake) is a bit renegade, unapo­lo­get­ic­ally grasping for all she wants in life, regard­less of social implic­a­tions or pro­priety. It’s respect­able and ardent, but also bor­ders on ego­centric, espe­cially con­sid­ering how ideal­istic and sol­ipsistic she can be when not acting out of ven­geance. As a result, char­acter iden­ti­fic­a­tion is min­imal, which is prob­lem­atic when the ire of the film depends on this almost entirely.

This expect­a­tion is apparent from the opening act, when Lister is unce­re­mo­ni­ously dumped by her secret gal pal Mariana (Anne Madeley), whose mar­riage to the much older Charles Lawton (Michael Culkin) is announced unex­pec­tedly at a social gath­ering. She pleads, she cries, she locks her­self in her room—really everything that a dev­ast­ated lover might do in a bodice-drama. The thing is that we have no idea who these char­ac­ters are, how they met, or what their his­tory is, or how they see the world, and so on, so it’s dif­fi­cult to care about whatever it is they’re going on about.

Thankfully, things pick up later in the film while Anne con­tinues to pursue the mar­ried Mariana, as her loyal and likable friend Tib (Susan Lynch) makes her own romantic interests known. This love tri­angle gives the drama some much-needed heft, and offers a diver­sion from Lister’s frus­trating per­son­ality. Mariana is a bit of a twit, to be sure, but her dis­pos­i­tion is under­stand­able, given her grounding in reality. Similarly, Tib’s tend­ency to say the inap­pro­priate, and wear her feel­ings on her sleeve, makes her far more access­ible than the tit­ular heroine.

But aside from a frus­trating prot­ag­onist and a minor plot, this is a pro­fes­sion­ally assembled piece with solid acting all around, decent art design and com­petent, if slightly flat, dir­ec­tion. It’s just some­thing more akin to a Sunday after­noon diver­sion than a full-blown the­at­rical experience.

Tagged as: #insideout10, homosexuality

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Family Tree (L’arbre et la forêt)

by Robert Bell on May 25, 2010

in Film Festivals,Inside Out

Family Tree (L'arbre et la forêt)
Family Tree (L’arbre et la forêt) screens on Friday May 28 at 7:15pm at the ROM Theatre. Buy tickets here.

Family Tree (L’arbre et la forêt) (Directors: Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau): Tackling issues of gen­er­a­tional mani­fest­a­tions of repressed iden­tity and their reper­cus­sions, along with notions of the self as a con­struct of per­sonal his­tor­ical sig­ni­fiers, Family Tree gives a layered, subtle and thoughtful look at three gen­er­a­tions of a family built on deceitful, but sin­cere, inten­tions. While decidedly dif­ferent in its alleg­or­ical implic­a­tions, defying the notion of estate as dying legacy and ignoring glob­al­iz­a­tion out­right, under­stand­ably, it shares styl­istic and them­atic sim­il­ar­ities to Olivier Assayas’s recent mas­ter­piece, Summer Hours (review).

Likewise, this tale of unspoken angst takes place almost entirely at a lush and capa­cious estate, here sur­rounded by a family tree plant­a­tion. Aging grand­par­ents Frederick (Guy Marchand) and Marianne (Francoise Fabian) Muller plan the divi­sion of wealth between their sur­viving son Guillaume (Francois Negret) and grand­daughter Delphine (Sabrina Seyvecou), selling off a por­tion of their forest to take a trip to the South Pole while they still have time.

Things open with the funeral of Charles, Delphine’s father, which Frederick skips much to the dis­ap­point­ment and rage of other family mem­bers. What they don’t know, and soon learn, is that this father and son pairing hated each other, mainly due to a secret that Frederick has long hidden from his family.

In sheer virtue of this film playing at a gay and les­bian film fest­ival, we can guess what that secret might be, but this is less a film about homo­sexu­ality than it is about not let­ting your past, or labels, over­take who you are, or the legacy you’ve built. It shows a dys­func­tional but caring family trying to under­stand each other without having the lan­guage, or shared under­standing, to do so. And in this, the appeal is uni­versal, whether it is pri­or­it­izing inan­imate accu­mu­lated objects, or eso­teric notions of hap­pi­ness, dif­fering and shared per­spect­ives unite and dis­tance these people with equal gravity.

Some family exchanges can feel a little too on-the-nose and expos­i­tional, with Marianne pointing out to her ex-daughter-in-law that she wasn’t entirely a passive victim without a great deal of sub­tlety, and the par­allel of self-hatred in Frederick and Guillaume being all but shown in point form. But this doesn’t hurt the overall effect of a quiet, gorgeously-filmed and well-acted story of finding one’s place in a world con­stantly cat­egor­izing and imposing morality.

If the meta­phor of a family tree looming over the family house with slight instability seems trite, this exer­cise in reclam­a­tion and let­ting go is nothing of the sort, offering a com­pas­sionate glimpse at flawed people doing their best to work with what life has offered.

Tagged as: #insideout10, family, france, homosexuality

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Plan B

by Robert Bell on May 25, 2010

in Film Festivals,Inside Out

Plan B

Plan B (Director: Marco Berger): If ever there were an award given for most inap­pro­priate lingering shots of snugly covered gen­italia, it would surely go to Plan B, a movie that boasts mul­tiple exchanges with little more than sta­tionary close-ups of crotches. The jus­ti­fic­a­tion is likely some­thing to the effect of exag­ger­ated sexual ten­sion, or gender role irony in response to female objectivity in film, where women are never filmed in close-up without some vis­ible boobage, but real­ist­ic­ally it seems a lot more like, “hey, I can see a dick out­line and it’s turning me on!”

Perhaps this shouldn’t be sur­prising in a film that is essen­tially a per­verse fantasy, with Bruno (Manuel Vignau) responding to his ex-girlfriend’s lack of romantic interest by devel­oping an ersatz homo­sexual rela­tion­ship with her new boy­friend Pablo (Lucas Ferraro). It’s the sort of thing that broad high-concept het­ero­norm­ative comedy is based on, and, if it were an American film, it would likely fea­ture Will Ferrell and Paul Rudd.

But this isn’t a comedy, and it isn’t inter­ested in catering to tra­di­tional male anxi­eties, playing out through a series of awk­ward boyish con­ver­sa­tions and latent sexual ten­sion. The goal is to create an organic union between unlikely lovers, with a pointed weed-induced con­ver­sa­tion about Neverland to let us know that the dir­ector has read some queer theory. They dis­cuss tele­vi­sion shows, child­hood slee­p­overs and Bruno even pulls out some clever lies in order to speed up impending coitus.

Because the actors throw them­selves into the material, bringing charm to some truly dreadful dia­logue, there is minor appeal to what is mostly a series of can­didly filmed con­ver­sa­tions that don’t always propel the story for­ward. The suc­cess here comes from the vis­ible budgetary lim­it­a­tions and estab­lished chem­istry, more so than the film itself, which has its moments, but is mostly plod­ding, sloppy and exceed­ingly uncomfortable.

Tagged as: #insideout10, argentina, homosexuality

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