Author: LaurenDolceVita

A 2021 Film Journey: Day 114

On By LaurenDolceVitaIn Movie ReviewsLeave a comment

After a rough week I’m already feeling a bit better from having time away from work. I only made it through one movie again today, but that was more because of catching up on writing than any movie watching motivation. Tomorrow will likewise be filled with finishing my Oscar pick and prediction post, but even if I make it through minimal movies this weekend I’ll be feeling much better regardless.

Black Sunday (1960, Dir. Mario Bava)

Thirty years of horror: Black Sunday (1960) - Quarter to Three

After enjoying last night’s viewing of Blood and Black Lace, it felt only natural to double down another Mario Bava feature. This time I chose to put on his critically acclaimed debut film Black Sunday. While I intrinsically associate Bava with the Italian giallo genre, Black Sunday instead draws upon European gothic horror reminiscent of the Universal monster movies from decades prior.

Despite being made only four years prior to last night’s feature. Black Sunday felt like a film from a much earlier era than Blood and Black Lace. The style and tone shift between the two films jarring and have impacted my opinion on the two. Black Sunday is a strong debut. Bava shows a strong aptitude for filmmaking in his take on the vampire mythos. However, for as strong a debut as the film may be, it is first and foremost mimicry of the classic horror films that preceded it. The bombastic tone and visual flare that accompany the giallo films he would later be credited as a forefather of are more striking and unique. Black Sunday is a perfectly solid gothic horror film, but that is not why I chose to watch another of Bava’s films.

SIFF 2021: Son of Monarchs

On By LaurenDolceVitaIn Festivals, SIFF 20212 Comments
Son of Monarchs: A Biologist Looks For Tranquillity In His Work [Review]

In Son of Monarchs, Mexican director Alexis Gambis heavily utilizes the butterfly imagery from its lead character’s childhood and profession for its metamorphosis symbolism. While the thematic imagery may be on the nose, the accompanying film is filled with the appropriate complexity and nuance to play off the obvious imagery.

Mendel (Tenoch Huerta) is a Mexican man living in New York where he is working on mapping the genome of the monarch butterfly. This passion of his came from his childhood living in the butterfly forests of Michoacán. Son of Monarchs focuses on Mendel as he travels back and forth between his two homes and attempts to process trauma from his childhood while coming into his own. Every piece of information he discovers from altering the genes of his butterflies, corresponds to a new repressed moment from his childhood making itself aware.

Son of Monarchs greatest strength is how it blends the surface level metaphors with haunting imagery and complex themes. The butterfly is one of the most recognizable symbols for a period of change or transition. While such heavy reliance on obvious symbolism could lead to a movie feeling like something straight out of film school, Gambis avoids this pitfall in two ways. First is to give butterflies a narrative purpose in the story beyond that of pure symbolism. Mendel’s home is known for the presence of monarch butterflies that turn the forest orange, so his memories of and adult interest in them gives the symbol more credence. The other technique implemented in film is to use the symbol for a more complex situation than a surface level transition. Mendel’s transition is not from childhood to adulthood as would be the simple metaphor, but instead is a transition from repression to acceptance. The juxtaposition between simplistic symbolism and complex themes creates an accessible intelligent whole.

Son of Monarchs tells a complex story rich with beautiful imagery and mature themes. The imagery of the butterflies both in the wild and under a microscope create a haunting dichotomy, and perfectly fit into the film’s themes and message.

A 2021 Film Journey: Day 113

On By LaurenDolceVitaIn Movie ReviewsLeave a comment

I am late with yesterday’s post again. As I mentioned most of the week, the fatigue has been hitting me exceptionally hard lately. I am taking some time off next week, so hopefully I will be able to recharge and get back on track with getting these out in a timelier manner. And while I yesterdays post is going up a bit late, I did watch this film yesterday, so it counts.

Blood and Black Lace (1964, Dir. Mario Bava)

Blood and Black Lace" (1964): Bava at His Best - Gruesome Magazine

As I think I mentioned earlier in the year when I watched some of Dario Argento’s films, the Giallo genre continues to be a giant blind spot of mine. Blood and Black Lace was actually my first Mario Bava film, and while I do not believe it is his most well-known film, it popped up on my Amazon Prime so I decided why not.

While I am may still be a Giallo neophyte, the trademarks of the Italian filmmaking style have become less reflexively off-putting. While the constant redubbing is awkward as always, upon getting used to it, it provides a level of cheesy charm. When combined with the oversaturated colors and gratuitous gore and hints at nudity create a wonderfully sleazy whole.

Blood and Black Lace’s setting of a fashion house worked perfectly for the style. The couture dresses and set designing popped in the film’s Technicolor wonder. Each murder used the setting and actors to create a memorable death sequence repeatedly building on the other. Even if the mystery was obvious, the red herrings we too obvious to believe, the film succeeds in spectacle alone.

A 2021 Film Journey: Day 112

On By LaurenDolceVitaIn Movie ReviewsLeave a comment

Oops, I fell asleep while writing this last night. Getting it up now.

Today was another rough one for me. I have been feeling exhausted all week and engaging in much of anything has been difficult. So today is going to be a quick post and I am going to hope that once the weekend hits, I will be able to catch up on my promised posts as well as write something longer in these entries.

The Juniper Tree (1990, Dir. Nietzchka Keene)

björk guðmundsdóttir: Björk - The Juniper Tree - A Dark Tale Of Witchcraft & Mysticism (1986) - [AAC-M4A]

10 years before her Cannes winning performance in Dancer in the Dark (2000, Dir. Lars von Trier) Björk starred in The Juniper Tree in the time between singing for The Sugarcubes and beginning her solo career. In the film, a 24-year-old Björk proves that she has always embodied the otherworldly charisma that is her trademark now. Björk’s ethereal quality meshes perfectly with the grim fairy tale in her debut film appearance.

While Björk is the highlight and selling point for the Icelandic feature, Nietzchka Keene as writer, director, and editor did a fantastic job at creating an eerie fantastical environment. Her deft hand with tone shows though wonderfully creating an enchanting film to compliment her lead actress. Regrettably, The Juniper Tree was the only film she was able to complete before passing away from pancreatic cancer. Her voice was so strong in this debut feature, it would have wonderful to watch more of her films.

A 2021 Film Journey: Day 110 and 111

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I am sorry there was no post yesterday. I am not entirely sure what happened to me, but afterwork yesterday I just turned off for lack of a better word. I think that the pace of watching and writing from the film festival left me exhausted and the anxiety of yesterday’s jury verdict pushed me a little over the edge. Even today I was too exhausted to finish both of my outstanding SIFF reviews or watch a second film to make up for yesterday. Regardless, I am not going to beat myself up about this, I just felt like I ought to explain yesterday’s absence before jumping into today’s movie.

35 Shots of Rum (2008, Dir. Claire Denis)

35 Shots Of Rum (2008) by Claire Denis | Movie sets, Movie tv, Songs

35 Shots of Rum is an extremely intimate viewing experience. The father daughter relationship portrayed by Alex Descas and Mati Diop as Lionel and Joséphine is revelatory in its specificity. After Joséphine’s mother passed, she and her father became inseparable. The film follows the pair and their makeshift family from their apartment building as Lionel accepts that eventually and soon Joséphine will need to go out on her own.

From the minimalist score in the opening credits, the somber tone and personal storytelling are telegraphed perfectly. Claire Denis wields her tools as a director subtly yet sufficiently. Each scene builds upon the last creating a perfect crescendo of emotions through the very final shot.

SIFF 2021: God Exists, Her Name is Petrunya

On By LaurenDolceVitaIn Festivals, SIFF 20212 Comments
God Exists, Her Name Is Petrunya review – asks big questions, doesn't answer them | Berlin film festival 2019 | The Guardian

In her newest film God Exists, Her Name is Petrunya, Macedonian filmmaker Teona Strugar Mitevska sets lofty topic goals on which to comment. As the title hints at, the film explores the relationship between religious orthodoxy and women, but Mitevska also comments on the ever-decreasing job market and how it exacerbates the generational gap.

Zorica Nusheva plays Petrunya, an unemployed woman in her mid-thirties who finds her college degree in History to be more of a hindrance than a boon when job seeking. After a humiliating job interview set up by her aunt goes nowhere, she walks home past an ongoing religious ceremony where a priest throws a cross into a river and men jump of a bridge in competition to retrieve it. Despondent from another failure, Petrunya becomes impulsive and jumps into the water with the men and comes away with the cross and the scorn/ legal ire of the crowd.

For a film that attempted to touch on as many topics as God Exists, Her Name is Petrunya did, it ran out of things to say shockingly quick. The second half of the film takes place in a police station where Petrunya is being held despite not being under arrest. The purpose of the set is for the police to act as a narrative catalyst between Petrunya and the people who think she wronged them as well as the people who let her down. While reasonable in theory, the film becomes repetitive to the point of monotony as the same scene happens over and over again with a different secondary character and slightly different topic being the only variation. While the argument may be that each topic Petrunya is addressing stems from the same hole, that does not justify the staleness in direction. The argument can be made in a more engaging manner. Instead, the film just felt lazy.

God Exists, Her Name is Petrunya is a film that wanted to say a lot, but in attempting to it ended up saying little. Parallelisms can be drawn in cinema through a multitude of editing and plotting techniques, but the film utilizes an extremely flat repetition which stops the film in its tracks at the halfway mark and ceases to produce anything of interest. The film’s goals weren’t flawed, but its execution was.

A 2021 Film Journey: Day 109

On By LaurenDolceVitaIn Movie ReviewsLeave a comment

It feels weird to be going back to one post a day after the breakneck speed at which I was writing for SIFF. Though to be fair I am still finishing up with the last couple of SIFF posts, so I have a few more multi-post days to go. My major takeaway from the Festival, at least as far as writing goes, is that I can be doing much more than just these daily posts. I enjoy the personal nature that these posts take as opposed to the more formal reviews that I did for SIFF, but there is room in me for both. While I was writing a ton all last week, I am going to start expanding slowly to make sure everything stays sustainable. My plan as of right now is to post at least one bonus item each weekend. This weekend will be my Oscar picks and predictions, but I will be playing with the format from there. Anyway, here’s today’s movie.

Gunda (2020, Dir. Viktor Kosakovskiy)

Gunda' review: A wordlessly sublime slice of porcine life - Los Angeles Times

My film festival may be over, but that does not mean I’m going to stop watching pretentious and artsy movies. Gunda had been on my radar for a while now. It had occupied one of the top slots on Metacritic for most of the film starved 2020, but after it was denied an Oscar nomination it took me a while to get around to it. I am glad that I finally did get around to the film though, because this was a glorious piece of experimental film making.

Devoid of any plot, message, or even dialogue, Gunda is a series of untampered scenes of animals on a farmyard. The titular Gunda is a pig who begins the film by giving birth to a little of piglets. These animals headline the film with extended shots of the piglets exploring or nursing. While the film spends some time focusing on the farm’s cows and chickens – including a loveable one-legged rooster – the piglets are effectively first billing.

If this explanation makes the film seem protracted, that is because it is, but the deliberateness is intentional. Gunda asks its audience to slow down and appreciate the miniscule realities of life along with curious piglets. For those who require another selling point, the black and white cinematography by Viktor Kosakovskiy and Egil Håskjold Larsen is beyond breathtaking. The camera is always at eyelevel with the animal subjects providing the fullest image of each animal. This combined with some of the crispest high definition I have seen had me constantly questioning if I had upgraded to 4k and forgot. It may be a movie where nothing happens, but that did not stop me from being transfixed the entire time.

One extremely minor caution with the film is that there is no non-diegetic noise, and at times the animal noises can be extremely loud. What I am trying to get at is that the first scene with the minutes old baby piglets was filled with enough baby pig noises that it slightly upset one of my cats.

SIFF 2021: The Perfect Candidate

On By LaurenDolceVitaIn Festivals, SIFF 20213 Comments
The Perfect Candidate” to Launch on VOD in UK, in Lieu of Theatrical Release | Women and Hollywood

In 2012, Haifaa Al-Mansour made history as the first female filmmaker in Saudi Arabia. Her film Wadjda blended the personal with the cultural by telling a girl’s story in the extremely patriarchal country. Almost a decade later, Al-Mansour continues to tell stories focusing on this blend, but rather than the school age Wadjda, her new film The Perfect Candidate focuses on a young professional woman’s struggle in a country slowly progressing with women’s rights.

Dr. Maryam Alsafan (Mila Al Zahrani) is the attending physician at her local clinic. She receives some resistance to her care from the more religiously orthodox members of her community, but she is largely appreciated as a local medical alternative to the hospital in the city miles away. When an issue with her travel permit prevents her from attending a medical conference, she is inadvertently thrust into a city council political campaign that tests how much her community truly respects her rather than simply placates her.

Maryam’s political campaign is a captivating subject for a film. While it was never her intention to run, once thrust into it she takes to the challenge immediately. She and her sisters put together political commercials, and she immediately identifies paving over the flooded dirt road in front of her clinic as her highest priority. This priority comes in contrast to what the men assume her campaign would focus on. The men see only her gender and assume she must be running on a platform of more progressive women’s issues. In this assumption, they betray their own understandings of the treatment they offer her and all women. This interplay is the film’s strength. It creates a nuanced and complex story about the needs of women living in Saudi Arabia and how men see the women around them.

The Perfect Candidate is a narrative that appears simple upon first blush, but it has layered cultural underpinnings providing significant depth. Haifaa Al-Mansour is already a proven name in world cinema, and her newest film proves she belongs in the modern canon.

SIFF 2021: Fly So Far

On By LaurenDolceVitaIn Festivals, SIFF 20212 Comments
Fly So Far

El Salvador has some of the most regressive abortion laws in the world. Abortion is illegal for all reasons including in cases where the mother’s life is in danger. While on paper the Salvadorian government does at least not persecute women for miscarriages, in practice those cases often have their details manipulated to arrest the mothers for supposedly killing their babies. Fly So Far documents a group of 17 such women, Las 17, fighting for their freedom.

First time filmmaker Celina Escher uses the power of numbers to build her case in the opening third of the film. As each member of Las 17 retells the story that led to her imprisonment, distinct patterns emerge. These women were all in medical duress, and after losing consciousness they awoke to find themselves in handcuffed to a hospital bed. The repetitious nature of these story solidifies the assumption that the cruelty against these women is purposeful.

With this strong basis of governmental guilt as a basis, Fly So Far narrows its focus onto Teodora Vásquez one of the 17. After ten years imprisoned for her miscarriage, she is finally able to appeal her sentence, and does so with the backing of Amnesty International’s legal support. The remaining two thirds of the film focus almost entirely on Vásquez, her personal legal trials and what she attempts to do for the other 16 once freed.

The stratification of the film into two separate viewpoints proves to be both a boon and a bane to its success. Vásquez is the only woman initially released, so focusing on her rather than the 17 makes the most logistical sense, yet Escher’s decision to tell multiple stories of imprisonment rather than just Vásquez’s brought substantial power to the opening arguments. The narrowing of perspective is a sound decision, but the implementation of the transition was slightly flawed. The first section of the film uses animation as a story telling technique, and while it was necessary for recreations in the first third and not essential once the filming began, this difference (combined with the focus change) left the film feeling like two connected parts rather than a cohesive whole.

Fly So Far is a strong first documentary from Celina Escher. While there may be some cohesion issues within the film’s focus, the story Escher attempts to tell with her film is clear and well argued. Teodora Vásquez and the rest of Las 17’s stories are important, and Escher delivers a solid film for them.

SIFF 2021: Ma Belle, My Beauty

On By LaurenDolceVitaIn Festivals, SIFF 20212 Comments
Polyamorous Love Story 'Ma Belle, My Beauty' Sells After Sundance Bow - Variety

Reunions with past loves are complex in the best of circumstances. In her debut feature Ma Belle, My Beauty, director Marion Hill applies this universal truth to relationship with added eccentricities initially and a breakup that was anything but the clean.

Bertie (Idella Johnson), Lane (Hannah Pepper), and Fred (Lucien Guignard) were previously in a polyamorous relationship together. Years later, Bertie and Fred are monogamously married, but when Bertie becomes emotionally distant following the death of her father, Fred calls on Lane in hopes she can help. When talking with Bertie gets nowhere, Lane begins an ill-advised fling with Noa (Sivan Noam Shimon), a friend of the couple, in hopes of getting a rise out of the unengaged Bertie.

The use of a polyamorous relationship is well implemented by Hill. It is neither played for a joke nor seen as something impossible to maintain. When Noa asks Lane how she delt with sharing Bertie, she remarks that “it is easy to get along with someone who loves the same person you do”. The shared partner provides something in common between the two, and even after Lane split from the other two, she and Fred share a friendship that is at its strongest when looking out for Bertie.

Ma Belle, My Beauty is a frustrating movie in a directorially intended way. Bertie is an excruciatingly passive character. While Lane’s presence sparks some occasional outbursts, Bertie primarily sulks regardless of Lane’s actions. Similarity, Lane is not without her own frustrating moments. After the slightest rebuff from Bertie, Lane jumps straight into attempting to provoke her ex by starting a fling with Noa. Neither character is fully sympathetic. Watching these two flawed characters stumble through the film evokes a exasperated response and that is exactly the impact Hill was seeking.

Marion Hill’s first film show a significant understanding of the complexities of human emotions and how to capture relationships on screen. The film does not offer any simple answers to questions that seldom have them and is for the better because of it.