MIFF Notes #8: Dressage, Morocco, Climax, Cold War

I've never felt as physically and mentally exhausted as I have at MIFF. Watching three or four films in a day is like running a marathon. At first, you're excited to be doing something so fun and then, the reality hits you. You find yourself in a mid-MIFF slump and start hoping desperately for an end which is nowhere in sight. When I woke up on my second Saturday of the festival, I had less than five hours sleep on a hard floor, all I wanted to do was go back to sleep. I almost couldn't do it anymore, especially when I realised I was only halfway through. My back, neck, shoulders and muscles in near constant pain, exhausted far beyond what they're used to. My brain isn't much better. Unless a film is instantly engaging, I find myself thinking about other things, like how comfortable my boyfriend's shoulder would be or an intense KFC craving. I usually have to forcibly pull myself back into the film, and still enjoy it, but the effort itself is tiring.

So, why do I keep putting myself through this, even scheduling more and more films? Maybe madness or maybe because it is undeniably fun and exciting. Even mediocre MIFF films have something going for them, and when you find yourself watching something outstanding, the pain seems to melt away as you get pulled into the experience. As long as I can remind myself of that feeling, I can make it through some sore muscles.

Day nine was my hardest MIFF day so far, with my exhaustion really beginning to impact my views of the films I was watching. Thankfully, my first film of the day, Pooyah Badkoobeh's Iranian film Dressage (B+) was enough to keep me awake. A gripping and morally complex story, it also acts as a incisive character study of the lead, Golsa,played with fiery determination by Negar Moghaddam in her first performance. She is a bored youth from a poor family who finds herself drawn into local gang activity. However, when she refuses to hand over some potentially compromising security footage they pressured her to steal, she, and her family, are forced to realise the class and moral lines that divide her from her so-called friends.

Dressage (2018), via Variety

Golsa's stubbornness is a trait seen rarely onscreen, especially in a character this likeable, who tries her best to make her indiscretion right. We find ourselves rooting for her to maintain her moral stand, even when her parents and wealthier people get involved. Dressage doesn't provide easy answers to the dilemmas it raises, only complex moral questions and is all the better for it. Even if it doesn't take any surprising turns (as soon as it's revealed that giving up the tape will benefit more people than it hurts, the ending feels inevitable), it remains an enjoyably intriguing look at class differences, repentance and privilege.

While my fatigue didn't affect my enjoyment of Dressage, it almost definitely impacted my appreciation of my second film of the day, the 1930 film, Morocco, directed by Josef Von Sternberg. My decision in the last dispatch to not rate the classic films I watch at MIFF was inspired by my viewing of this film. It's hard to explain but for some reason, I found it hard to get into the mood and rhythms of a film almost 90 years old, despite frequently watching films from that time period and older.

Morocco (1930), via Pinterest

Morocco stars a luminescent Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper as lovers in a slow-paced cliched romance that bored me. My mind wandered frequently and I was unable to pull it back, losing track of the plot in a way that I was unable to recover from. However, the film is not without merit. Dietrich is stunning, particularly in the justly famous sequence where she shatters gender boundaries by looking perfect in a tux and kissing another woman on the lips. If only the rest of the film were so adventurous, falling into tired gender stereotyped cliches that went nowhere.

After this, I skipped my Mirai screening to catch up on my MIFF Notes, but I found myself wallowing in a kind of depression I hadn't seen since the festival began. It was my lowest and darkest moment at MIFF and I seriously considered giving up. If I had, I would've missed two of the best films of the year.

The first, Gaspar Noe's very French Climax (A), had been something I'd been apprehensive about watching. He's a director I struggle with, wondering whether his disturbing provocations like Irreversible and Enter The Void actually mean something or whether he simply delights in goading his audience. When I read that he was annoyed only 20 people walked out of the film's Cannes premiere earlier this year, my worries only grew. I spoke to a woman about it at the film prior, describing it as "viscerally terrifying, as though the boundary between me and the screen had vanished". She was the only person I knew who'd seen it, with many of my other friends either turned off by the suggestion or still annoyed at Noe about Love's 3D cumshot laziness. I wasn't really in the mood for something this disturbing, haven't felt deeply disturbed by Irreversible and I began to wonder what the hell I'd got myself in for. That feeling gave way to a steadily rising panic as I waited for an hour in the cold outside the Comedy Theatre.

Climax (2018), via Variety

Once I left two hours later, getting up out of my not-terrible seat, I realised my fears were misplaced. Yes, it's a lot and it's horrifying but Climax is also comfortably Noe's best film. In France in the 90s, a DJ, twenty young dancers, their instructor and her infant son celebrate a successful rehearsal by throwing an all-night rager. However, things get insane when they realise someone has spiked the Sangria they've all been drinking. What follows is a freakout so thrilling and terrifying, it resembles a horror movie more than a bad trip movie. Whereas Noe's previous films have delighted in depicting graphically confronting material, the controversial imagery in Climax is toned down. Instead of fucking us over by showing us disgusting material in detail, he messes with our mind by sending us straight into the centre of hell itself. And I loved it. Backed by a memorable 90s club soundtrack, colourful strobe lighting and a game cast, there is something intoxicating about the way it forces us to confront the darkness of humanity.

Climax is a film of two halves, with a slow build in it's first 40 minutes or so. At times, it's surprisingly boring, but it's hard to dislike. For once, Noe focuses on getting to know and recognise characters so we care when messed up stuff happens to them. It's like disaster movie plotting, a simple formula that works well. Yet, there are hints of the darkness that awaits them, especially in a border surrounding a TV where Noe is able to show off his influences (Salo, Suspiria, Dawn Of The Dead to name a few) But even this first section has time for an exhilarating, brilliantly choreographed and shot dance sequence that may in fact be the highlight of the whole film. It's up there with the title credits of Enter The Void as a defence of Noe as a director who is better than he is given credit for, using music, design and sheer visceral intensity to function as an assault on the senses.

However, it's in the film's second half that the director puts his fiendish genius to work, creating an escalating series of horrors, shot with steadicam precision. He challenges you, finding yourself either repulsed or pulled in, unable to turn away, desperate to know if a situation this chaotic can get any worse or end. At my screening, there were more than a few people who chose the first option (at one particularly horrifying moment, an entire row walked out, something I'm sure Noe would be very happy to here), but I was glued to the screen. I was horrified, terrified and I never wanted to end. Never before had I seen something that captures that feeling of losing yourself. Of that moment drunk fun turns into the utter terror of being out of your head and out of control. Of those paranoid seemingly never-ending nights where you writhe around on the floor, wondering why the fuck you did this to your body but still there is something thrilling about losing control in such a way. That feeling you chase next time you go drinking. In its impeccable camerawork and relentlessly kinetic energy, Gaspar Noe captures a unique personal terror and turns into a cinematic horror experience of the highest order. Utterly genius. I can't wait to see it again.

The other great film of my second weekend could not have been more different. While Climax is viscerally intense and kinetic, Pawel Pawlikowski's latest is a bleak and haunting love story. Like his previous film, the stunning Ida, Cold War (A) is shot in stark black-and-white in a boxy aspect ratio that favours framing the characters in the bottom third with dead space around them. I find this aesthetic style appealing, seeming to alienate the characters from the world and one another, something perfect for characters as lost as pianist Wiktor and much younger singer, Zula. Their turbulent decades long love affair is rife with infidelity and pain, yet they can't seem to live without one another, crossing countries and conflicts to stay together. Imagine if Linklater's Before trilogy was a third of the length, had the emotional devastation of Demy's The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg, a dash of music history and Tarkovsky's lyricism and you're close to understanding why Cold War works as well as it does.

Cold War (2018), via Culture.pl

At times, it feels breathless, moving from one year to the next, letting us fill in the gaps, but it never comes across as rushed, finding elegance and restraint in it's short run-time. It also finds desolation and hopelessness. We never really grow to feel Wiktor and Zula's love for one another, but that feels deliberate in a film that has the word 'cold' in the title. It's one of the harshest, bleakest films I've seen at the festival, yet it ends on a shot and a line so poetic and raw that it's hard not to be moved.

In the end, Cold War reveals itself to be a film about change and shifting power dynamics, be they in a relationship or in a national conflict. This is most clearly demonstrated by the recurrence of Zula's song, each time performed in a different style, from folk music to lounge and rock and roll. The film links the music to Zula's emotional state as well as the state of the country she is performing it in, providing an added layer of depth to a film that is much more complex than it initially appears to be. For a film so short, leaving Cold War feels like you've lived a lifetime in the best possible way.

In the next dispatch, I'll be discussing the four documentaries I did on the second weekend, including Grey Gardens sequel/prequel That Summer and the experimental [CENSORED]!