Life With Murder (Director: John Kastner): 20-year-old Mason Jenkins murdered his 18-year-old sister with multiple shotgun blasts to the head on January 6, 1998. The crime occurred in the home he resided in with his only sibling and parents, in the small town of Chatham, Ontario, and Mason was convicted of first-degree-murder after his shaky alibi was deemed not credible. Mason maintained his innocence until 2007, when he finally relented and provided a strange, irrational reason for having shot his sister, with whom he’d apparently always been close. Despite the hell their son put them through, the parents, Leslie and Brian, still choose to keep him in their lives, making regular visits to Mason at Warkworth Institution, a medium-security correctional facility.
Director/writer/producer John Kastner, a three-time Emmy winner, has a veritable goldmine of bizarre, intriguing details to work with in Life With Murder, with a fairly equal balance given to both a dissection of the crime, and its consequences and aftermath. Neither side is easy to watch, especially the latter. Kastner presents a thorough probing of the case, having gained access to police interrogation videos, the 911 call, crime scene documentation, and interviews with detectives from the case. The interrogation videos are quite fascinating to watch, but the interviews with the grieving parents, some from just mere hours after the murder occurred, are disturbing and uncomfortable viewing. The fact that the mother herself made repeated requests to the Chatham police to release the tapes for inclusion in the film doesn’t make the experience of watching them feel any less invasive or wrong.
Credit Kastner with digging deep to uncover previously unheard details about the case, including an exploration of Mason’s belated confession, not to mention a blindsiding bombshell about the crime that ratchets up the creep factor by several notches. Despite the rich ingredients with which it has to work, Kastner’s movie left me feeling unfulfilled and empty, like it should have had much more of an impact. Leslie’s statement that “you don’t throw a kid away” and the unconditional love she and Brian have for Mason, even after what he did (and especially after that bombshell, which I won’t spoil) just seem totally at odds with logic and reason, and only added to my frustration with the movie. Another mystery: the parents never moved out of the home where the murder took place. The film also ends up playing as something less cinematic and more suited to television, like an extended version of the CBC’s “The Fifth Estate” (which isn’t a knock on that program, as they do a lot of excellent work).
Official site of the film
(5/10)
Tagged as:
#hotdocs10,
crime,
family,
murder
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
The Kids Grow Up (Director: Doug Block): Personal filmmaking at its rawest, The Kids Grow Up is something of a follow-up to Doug Block’s previous film, 51 Birch Street. In the earlier film, Block explored his parents’ marriage and how his mother and father’s choices had affected him and his sisters as adults. It was also a film about getting to know your parents as people and not just as the roles they played in your upbringing. In his latest film, he explores how his daughter Lucy’s impending departure for college is affecting him and his wife Marjorie. Both films are about letting people break free of their familial roles, but in this one, it’s less about uncovering a mystery and more about dealing head-on with the passage of time.
Since he is a documentary filmmaker, he’s been filming his daughter since she was a baby and so he has an abundance of material to show her growing up. I particularly liked a sequence where from behind the camera, he asks his daughter, then 10 years old, “How was your childhood?”. The quick-witted Lucy doesn’t miss a beat. “Daddy, I’m 10 years old. I’m still a child!” The director isn’t quite as self-aware, at least until it dawns on him that Lucy’s leaving home must signal the end of his own arrested adolescence. In his zeal to be the polar opposite of his own distant father, he’s become his daughter’s “buddy” and is feeling her very necessary separation from him as abandonment. To make matters worse, Marjorie, who had seemed more at ease with the transition, suddenly suffers a major depressive episode and can barely leave her bed for several months. Doug’s helplessness during this period made me think that his real anxiety over Lucy’s departure was about how his relationship with Marjorie would change. They would no longer have Lucy as a shared focus, but would instead be back to focusing on each other.
The Kids Grow Up is a wonderfully-edited film that documents an important time in the life of Lucy Block, but more importantly, it documents a time of maturation for her father. Lucy comes across throughout the film (even as a young child) as remarkably self-assured and independent. We know that she will be fine at college, and wherever she goes after that. But along with her father, we mourn her childhood a little bit, knowing that she has to leave it behind. She doesn’t need the film to help her grow up, but we come to realize that it’s an important milestone for Doug. In mourning her childhood’s passing, he’s also mourning his own, but it helps him enter into a new phase of adulthood. By the end, he’s even becoming more comfortable calling himself grandfather to his stepson’s little boy. When I first heard the title of this film, I thought it was just an expression that parents used when they spoke to each other. But I came to realize that in the case of Doug Block and his daughter Lucy, he was talking about two kids, his daughter and himself. And it’s almost as much fun watching the father grow up as the little girl.
Official site of the film
(8/10)
Tagged as:
#hotdocs10,
family,
fathers-and-daughters,
parenting
Editor’s Note:
Doc Soup is a monthly documentary screening programme run by the good folks at
Hot Docs. It gives audiences in Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver their regular doc fix each year from the fall through to the spring, leading up to the Hot Docs festival itself.
Last Train Home (Director: Lixin Fan): China is arguably the world’s most important economy at the moment and the past fifty years have seen incredible changes, politically, economically and socially. Many filmmakers have emerged from the country, including a number of excellent documentarians. Chinese-Canadian Lixin Fan can proudly stand among them with Last Train Home, just his first feature film as director.
In my limited experience, to make a great film about China, you must encompass the country’s vastness, both in terms of geography and of population, but also be able to focus in on individual stories. In this case, we are introduced to the Zhangs, a family of migrant workers, just as the parents are about to make their yearly journey home to their village to celebrate Chinese New Year. Along with 140 million other migrant workers, this is often the only occasion they get to spend time with their children and parents. Making their way from the industrial city in which they work to their village in the countryside is an exhausting and stressful multi-day journey of more than 2,000 kilometres. Traveling by train, bus and ferry boat, they arrive exhausted and are able to spend only a few days with their son Yang (10) and daughter Qin (17), who have grown up under the care of their grandparents.
Despite the economic realities which make it necessary for families to be divided this way, the Zhangs feel they are doing it so that their children will have better lives. They constantly badger their children about their grades, perhaps because they really have nothing else to talk about. Daughter Qin is reaching the stage of adolescence where she begins to rebel against her parents. She complains that they’ve essentially abandoned her and her brother and a few months after they’ve returned to the city, she drops out of school to become a migrant worker herself. The boredom of rural life for a teenager looks very different from the perspective of her parents who have been away for 16 years working in horrific conditions just to provide their kids with this protected upbringing, but that’s lost on Qin, who wants the “freedom” of working in a factory.
While this is a crushing blow for her parents, who wanted to see her finish her studies, by the next year, they’re ready to travel home again for the New Year holiday. They’ve been pressuring Qin to return to school, and it looks as though she’s reluctantly agreed. But this year’s migration is affected by a snowstorm which knocks out the electrical grid and delays the trains for days. The scenes of huge crowds pushing each other are harrowing. While the trip home is a huge hassle at the best of times, it become a terrifying ordeal when schedules don’t run smoothly. When they finally board their train, it’s clear that Qin is not speaking with her parents, and she spends the whole trip in sullen silence.
Things come to a head during the holiday, and Qin’s insolence leads to a physical confrontation with her father. Eventually, like all parents, they resign themselves to letting Qin go her own way, hoping that son Yang can finish school and support the family. In the meantime, they return to the city again, back to their monotonous factory jobs.
My synopsis makes this sound like a fiction feature, and for all the intimacy the filmmakers achieve, it might as well be. It’s helped tremendously by some very crisp editing, as well as some sweeping cinematography of the lush Chinese countryside. Last Train Home succeeds in capturing both the epic scale of the changes sweeping today’s China and their impact on the individual families struggling with them.
Two additional notes. First the disclaimer: my company (Kinosmith) is the Canadian distributor for this film. And second, the film is headed to the Sundance Film Festival, where it will compete in the World Cinema Documentary Competition.
Here is the Q&A with director Lixin Fan 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: 15:48
Official site of the film
(9/10)
Tagged as:
china,
family,
globalization
L’heure d’été (Summer Hours) (Director: Olivier Assayas): On the one hand, Summer Hours has been getting some of the strongest reviews of the year, and yet in some quarters it is being derided as “the furniture movie.” Let me explain.
Hélène (Edith Scob) is the matriarch of a large extended family. Her daughter Adrienne and sons Frédéric and Jérémie visit her in her country home perhaps twice a year. Her uncle was a famous painter and so the house is filled with valuable objets d’art; paintings and furniture are both everyday objects and valuable art pieces. She pulls aside eldest son Frédéric (Charles Berling) during a family visit to speak to him about what should be done with all these things after her death. He doesn’t want to listen. Of course we’ll keep the house as it is, he tells her, for them and their children. But when she dies unexpectedly, it turns out that his siblings have different feelings.
Adrienne (Juliette Binoche) works as a designer in New York City and is constantly in motion. She treasures her memories but has no attachment to the things now that her mother has gone. Jérémie (Jérémie Renier) works as a plant manager in China and has settled there with his wife and children. He needs money to buy a bigger house. So the push and pull begins over what to do with everything. Considering some of the criticism I’d heard, I expected this to be petty, but it definitely is not. This family loves each other deeply, but their lives have taken them to different places.
Assayas’ film pointedly asks us what our “stuff” actually means to us. Hélène laments that when she goes, so much goes with her. Each object in her house has a history that only she can tell. The children’s memories are different, less attached, and the grandchildren hardly know the place at all. The film is a moving meditation on growing old and leaving the world. When each person dies, she takes many things out of the world forever. Though the objects are left behind, their life has gone with the person who held their story. In the end, objects, even beautiful ones, are only objects when their stories have been forgotten.
Far from being a movie about furniture, Summer Hours is about human beings and their absolutely unique contributions to the world. I could not watch this film without thinking every second of another film. Mia Hansen-Løve, Assayas’ wife, directed the similarly powerful Le père de mes enfants (The Father of My Children) (review). Not only do they share a similar theme, but both feature the lovely and magnetic Alice de Lencquesaing, who has a very bright future ahead of her. As well, both directors have an incredible way of working with their actors, coaxing performances of real depth. Though I don’t think Hansen-Løve’s film has yet received the acclaim it deserves, the two films would make a wonderful double-bill.
Official site of the film
(8/10)
Tagged as:
aging,
death,
family,
france
