MIFF Notes #2: Jafar Panahi's Three Faces & Cattet and Forzani's Let The Corpses Tan

When I woke up on the first morning of MIFF, it was not joy or excitement that I felt, it was a kind of panic. Not a normal brush off kind. No, this was deep in my gut terror. Terror of the new, terror of crowds of strangers, terror at the sheer enormity of the task ahead of me. Maybe I'd made a mistake, there was still time, I could still cancel. However, that phrase I used in my first dispatch came back to me, "MIFF is like Christmas to cinephiles" and all that fun and joy came rushing back to me, and I was more than ready to get started.

So, like every child at Christmas, I arrived way too early and had to spend a long time impatiently twiddling my thumbs. Getting there close to two hours early was excruciating and I do not recommend it. Eventually the minutes ticked by and I waited in line at the Regent Theatre for my first film, the latest from Iranian director Jafar Panahi. Once we entered, I was so enamoured by the building's awe-inspiring interiors that I walked into the person in front of me and had to apologise profusely. Inside, I met with friends from two of my social groups, Film Club and Cinematheque, and as we debated where the best place to sit was and what was the best approach to making the most out of MIFF, I was struck by how strange it all was. Here my worlds were colliding and it was working, such is the power of MIFF and of cinema.

I imagine the power of cinema is a chief concern for someone like Jafar Panahi. Despite being banned from film making (or leaving his country) in his native Iran in 2010, he remains a consistent director, having made four films since then. Three Faces (B+) is easily his most ambitious and, in many ways, traditional film since his ban, featuring a conventional, fictionalised narrative, but retaining many of his stylistic techniques. Panahi and actress Behnaz Jafari, playing versions of themselves, go to an isolated town to investigate a disturbing video that was sent to them of a young woman appearing to commit suicide. What begins as an engrossing mystery in its first half, becomes a damning exploration of oppression once the truth is revealed. Here, Panahi tackles feminist themes in a matter that is both memorable and incredibly depressing. He presents no easy solutions, as there are none but there is strength in sharing the plight of these trapped women, a position Panahi surely feels much empathy for.

Jafar Panahi and Behnaz Jafari in Three Faces (2018)

For those who've followed the director's career since his ban, its inspiring to see the ways he's pushed back against his enforced limitations. The angry impassioned plea while under house arrest gave his This Is Not A Film (2011) a kind of claustrophobic urgency, while Taxi Tehran (2015, also known as Jafar Panahi's Taxi) saw him more relaxed, driving through the streets of Tehran and seeing some joy in the people he met. Three Faces is an even bigger push back, telling a complex narrative in a town where, as one character memorably states, "there are more satellites than people." Panahi has to be applauded for his bravery and strength in continuing to make films in such difficult conditions. While Faces is not perfect, perhaps taking too many cues from his recently deceased mentor the great Abbas Kiarostami, its best moments see his enforced limitations turned into virtues. The dashboard mounted windshield camera gets a deeply symbolic payoff in the final shot, but it's an earlier moment that most stands out. From inside the car, Panahi watches a group of women dance, silhouetted behind a curtain, a moment of joy censored and obscured.

Speaking of deeply symbolic, the other film I saw on my first day at MIFF was the deliriously entertaining, frequently confusing genre mash-up Let The Corpses Tan (B). Directed by French married couple Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani (best known for their two updated giallo features, both of which I'll be seeing at the festival), the film depicts a day long shoot-out between a handful of people in a picturesque island hotel, where the discovery of weapons quickly changes the power dynamics. It's a bit like Tarantino's The Hateful Eight (or to a lesser extent Wheatley's Free Fire), what with the frequent Morricone cues and the playing with time, but this is an altogether stranger and more intoxicating affair.

Let The Corpses Tan (2017)

Cattet and Forzani take stylistic cues from Spaghetti Westerns, Russ Meyer's badass buxom babes, here played by cult favourite Elina Löwensohn, Argento, Gaspar Noe's idea of cinema as an assault on the senses as well as the same typeface as Irreversible and Saul Bass' Phase IV's obsession with ants, colour and sunsets to name but a few. Its a film that's impossible to get a handle on. Just when you think you've understood what's going on, there'll be an unexplained sequence of a woman covered in gold paint being tied up until her breasts burst with champagne. That's a surreal and entertaining thing to watch, but one can't help wondering what does it all mean? In a Q & A after the movie, Cattet and Forzani stated that everything was deliberate, everything has a meaning. I don't know what that is though. I was more intrigued by their way of working, which was to cut the film image first then sound. Usually films are produced the other way, cut to the beat (Noe is very good at it), but their method created a more unusual and unique film, with memorable layers of sound. As Forzani said, every gunshot feels physical. In a movie where style is more memorable than substance, maybe the best way to appreciate it is to let it wash over you, taking in all of its gorgeous 16mm cinematography.

Day one is over, my panic attack is averted and I am more ready than ever to continue with MIFF. Tomorrow, I'll be watching Nuri Bilge Ceylan's The Wild Pear Tree, a Colombian film about the drug trade, Three Identical Strangers and another Cattet Forzani slice of weirdness. Whether I'll have time to do my write up after that, we'll see.