MIFF Notes #3: The Wild Pear Tree, Amer, Three Identical Strangers, Birds Of Passage

I'd heard from many a MIFF regular that the Comedy Theater was the festival's worst venue, but I'd been hoping they'd been exaggerating. As I stood in the cold outside the theater, listening to a middle-aged white guy complaining loudly about how cold it was to a poor volunteer, I realized they may have been right. Inside, the seats are uncomfortable, slippery and hard, and the layout of the venue means you either have to look up or down onto the screen as there is no direct position. It's far from an ideal venue, particularly if you're doing two lengthy movies back to back as I did on my second day at the festival.

The first film I watched there was Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan's The Wild Pear Tree (B). Like his previous films, Once Upon A Time In Anatolia (2011) and the Palme D'Or winning Winter Sleep (2014), it's marked by long complex conversations on heady topics like fate, the purpose of writing and religion. Whereas Sleep largely consisted of these long dialogue scenes (one of which was over 40 minutes) with minimal plot, Pear Tree is almost the opposite. The story follows university graduate Sinan as he returns home to find funding to publish his first novel, a goal complicated by the depths of his father's gambling problem. As he wanders around, the plot frequently stops for these long conversation scenes. Some are more engaging than others.

The Wild Pear Tree (2018)

The film's most interesting scene comes roughly a third of the way through as Sinan alternately seeks advice and provokes a local author. It's a deliciously engaging conversation, exploring the complexity of writing and the generation gap in a way that's riveting, with shifting power dynamics. That it also shows up the entitled, smug and sexist Sinan in an earned, perfect grace note that is very funny (a tone the film had not gone for prior) helps it become an exhilarating scene. However, other conversations feel superfluous, especially an interminably dull conversation on the subject of religion which includes metaphor after metaphor (who speaks like that? And if so, are they this annoying?). That the conversation essentially boils down to the Life of Pi-esque argument of 'God is the better story' makes it feel especially pointless.

These conversations are loosely connected to the plot, but are deeply revealing for characters and motivation. The problem there (apart from the simplistic treatment of the film's two notable female characters) is that the vast majority of the conversing characters only appear in that one scene, but are more developed than the film's key relationship. Sinan's frustration with his father is annoyingly underdeveloped and not really very compelling.

Ceylan has stated that he doesn't mind if his films bore his audience, which they frequently do. But as he moves away from the visually stunning and thematic depth of Once Upon A Time In Anatolia to these longer, dialogue focused films, his work is becoming less cinematic and more overtly novelistic. While the Autumnal cinematography provides visual interest, I can't help wonder if there is a better medium for depicting conversations.

For a more purely cinematic experience, I doubt I will see a film as sensory as Cattet and Forzani's 2009 debut, Amer (A). Coming at the end of a long day, it hit me like electricity. Stripping almost all plot and dialogue away, it is a horror movie of the most experimental kind. Divided into three sections (inspired by, per the Q&A that followed, Mario Bava, Japanese pink films and giallo respectively), it consists mainly of extreme close-ups, both visually and in sound. Every movement has a sound attached, from skin on skin to the squeeze of leather or the pulling of a comb's teeth. It's easily the most sensory film I've ever seen, tactile in a way that's hard to explain, as though we were in the protagonist's mind (virtual reality would pay to use sound more).

Amer (2009)

Amer is so purely experimental and strange that I'm half convinced I imagined it in some sleep-deprived fever dream. How else could it achieve that logic of a dream where it's impossible to explain but still makes sense? Where no specific memories come back, but a feeling of sensory experiences, like the moment a train ride features so many strange cut-up extreme close-ups it's like watching a sequel to Willard Maas' Geography of the Body.

As the 'normal' sequences are already so intimate, so visceral, Amer's final act descent into violence is astonishingly effective. I heard several of the other filmgoers cry out, perhaps because they too felt every cut and realized that each slice was cutting through flesh (something it's easy to become desensitized to if you've seen a lot of horror movies). The film's delirious, erotic, almost embarrassingly personal atmosphere drew me in and I loved every second of it. As the lights went up, I heard a woman say to her friend, "I wasn't expecting it to be so avant-garde." Clearly a film for those who like their movies weird.

A strange film with a wider appeal is the fascinating documentary Three Identical Strangers (B+). Triplets Bobby, Eddy and David were separated at birth before bumping into one another as adults. To say more would be cruel, as the story twists and turns. What appears to be a touching story of reunion just gets crazier and darker.

Three Identical Strangers (2018)

As a piece of film making though, it is awkwardly edited and painfully obvious at times. As interviewees describe how the triplets painted the town, 'Kids in America' undersides. Worse, each new revelation is immediately followed by a montage of previous clips as supporting evidence, as though we weren't smart enough to put it together.

However, the story is compelling enough to overcome these limitations and it has attracted a lot of festival buzz. The session I was at was completely booked and I saw my first celebrity at MIFF. Michala Banas (best known for McLeod's Daughters, but I know her mainly from Nowhere Boys) sat behind me. She was laughing and gasping like the rest of us and she almost definitely heard my very loud whispered "oh my God" at a shocking late film revelation which floored me. Sorry if I disturbed you, Michala, hope you're enjoying MIFF!

While Strangers was engrossing, perhaps I enjoyed it more having come from my second film at the Comedy Theatre, and my weakest so far, Colombian drug trade film Birds Of Passage (C). When I noticed that it was co-directed by Ciro Guerra, my expectations were high, having enjoyed his previous effort, Embrace Of The Serpent (2015). However, there's none of that film's strange Apocalypse Now-infused dreaminess (or its crisp black and white cinematography), instead telling a cliched and uninvolving story about a tribe's rise and fall in the drug trade from the 60s to the 80s.

Birds Of Passage (2018)

Despite some beautiful desert cinematography, the characters are thinly sketched, taking place over too long a time and changing focus so frequently that there's no room for development. It's a straight forward affair that drags, feeling longer than The Wild Pear Tree despite being a full hour shorter.

Maybe I was just disappointed that the image used in the program and the poster suggested that a young woman would be the lead. She is, but only for the arresting, beautiful opening sequence where she takes place in a tribal ritual in stunning red dress. Hope you don't want to know more about her, because getting married, pregnant and meeting her end is the extent of her development as a character. Far from satisfying.

Day two of MIFF is over. I'm exhausted already but more than excited than ever to discover great films! As I type this, I'm waiting in the cinema for Frederick Wiseman's three and a half hour documentary on the New York Public Library to start. After this, I'm doing my final Cattet Forzani feature (sob) and a Brazilian lesbian wererwolf fantasy. I can't wait!