My Film Festival picks for today give us an acting duel between a current and a future Pope, superb journalism trailing nationalist agitators in India, Inuit people trying to understand Canada and all of us trying to understand a Hong Kong story told in animation.
The titles are:
Two Popes
Reason
One Day in the Life of Noah Piugattuk
No. 7 Cherry Lane
THE TWO POPES: Hard to expect, but this high-toned acting summit between Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce is highly entertaining as well as serious in content. They talk theology and personal ambition and regrets and hopes with more funny comments than you’d imagine. It’s a crowd-pleaser. Hopkins is Pope Benedict, a German, a loner, an academic who won the job in a conclave that placed Pryce, as Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina, second.
Now, eight years later, the Cardinal is back in Rome to ask the Pope to let him retire. The pontiff doesn’t want to deal with that right now and instead the two men have chats and dinner conversations about their lives and their ideas. That tune Jorge whistles is an ABBA song, not a hymn. The Pope isn’t into pop culture or even football. Jorge wants the Church to change because people are leaving it. The Pope agrees but is too conservative to lead anything major. Jorge tells of his biggest regret, which we see in flashbacks, his conduct after the coup in Argentina, when he thought co-operating with the military government would protect the priests. The Pope, who I thought might have some similar stories from home, instead reveals he wants to step down. That comes out of the blue with no foreshadowing. A small flaw in a film that’s intelligent and manages to balance a reverent tone with a good dose of humor. Both the director and screenwriter have Academy Award nominations in their resume: Fernando Meirelles for the Brazilian film City of God and Anthony McCarten for three films.
REASON: This is probably the most incendiary documentary at VIFF this year. It is certainly the most information packed and, at 3½ hours, likely the longest. It’s worth sticking through because this is top notch journalism. It helps explain several events in India these days including the sabre rattling over Kashmir and the theft just last week of some of Gandhi’s ashes from a shrine and the despoiling of his photograph. Hindu nationalists are suspected, the very types this film is about. Be prepared to get an avalanche of information about them. There’s obviously a demand; today’s screening is sold out (watch for standby tickets or see it tomorrow morning).
Filmmaker Anand Patwardhan digs deep into the history, inspiration and activities of the radical Hindu movement known as RSS. It operates as various separate groups. There’s an ashram in Goa where a secretive hypno-therapist teaches meditation and “self-defense” with guns. Remember the Muslim family attacked by a mob after a Hindu priest announced they were eating beef? The film has that priest, explaining that “they” made him announce it but not saying who “they” are. The film does give the names. It documents the killings of several activists, a Communist party leader and a journalist who exposed the nationalist movement and its ties to the current national government. It calls Hindu thugs “cow vigilantes,” has video showing their campaign to create a Hindu state and many demonstrations by students opposing them. Gandhi was killed for being accomodating to Muslims, the common knowledge says. The film proves he was killed for trying to remake India’s class system, the Brahmin culture. His fight continues in many ways, as you’ll see and learn.
ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF NOAH PIUGATTUK: The new one from the team that gave us Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, including the director Zacharias Kunuk, is another clear-eyed examination of life in the far north. This one is more languid and relies very much on a series of conversations. They are compelling though and reveal precisely how colonialism looks. This is based on a true story by the way; there’s a clip of the real Noah attached at the end.
It opens with an Indian family casually having tea. That starts the film off slowly, maybe deliberately prepping us to expect fine pictures, Baffin Island snow and such, but not much speedy action. Noah and two others go out on their dogsled to hunt. They spot another sled in the distance, then realize one of the two men on it is white and immediately understand they’ll be under supervision yet again. When they all sit down to talk, Noah (played by Apayata Kotierk) is being asked by a Canadian government representative (Kim Bodnia) to, in effect, give up his traditional way of life. He’s to move to a settlement, as part of a program Canada did enforce on Inuit people back in the 60s. They talk at length about what that means. He’ll have to follow rules; he’ll get family allowance in return. The talk through a translator is marred by mistranslations, misunderstandings and mistrust but they converse on and try to overcome all that. It’s a very credible version of how interchanges like that went, and probably still do. There’s good will on both sides but a divide that’s awfully wide. Its fascinating to watch it portrayed like this. Screens Mon evening and Wed afternoon.
NO. 7 CHERRY LANE: We used to calls work like this trippy. This is stream-of-consciousness storytelling with more attention paid to mood and atmosphere than spinning a narrative. We move forward and backward in time abiding bewilderment, confusion even, now and then. But it’s stylish, animated and fun to watch anyway and it won the best screenplay prize at the Venice Film Festival. Careful, there are slow parts.
It’s written and directed by Yonfan, a Hong Kong veteran who seems to have taken 10 years off before jumping into a new medium for him: animation. There are dreams, usually erotic, some admiring of male physiques at tennis and in a shower, and then a young man’s fantasy relationship with two women: a student and her mother. Ziming is a tutor trying to teach English literature to Mrs. Yu’s daughter Meiling. She’s slow appreciating Jane Eyre; he reads Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past himself, a stark try at inserting symbolism into the film. The streets outside are full of demonstrators (the anti-British types who marched in 1967, not the anti-Beijing protestors of today). Mrs. Wu says revolution is old hat for her; she was there for the real one. Ziming takes her to the movies where they watch Simone Signoret films (neatly duplicated in animation) and get their hormones up. What it is all supposed to mean isn’t obvious except possibly as a scattering of thoughts on history, desire, changes in society and of course, the movies. Go for the imagination and nostalgia. It screens Tues evening and Thurs afternoon.