SIFF SCENE 2018: Four Films I loved
Finally, I get to talk about this year’s Seattle International Film Festival, what I saw and what I liked. My festival viewing this year was cut short by a planned vacation. But I still managed to see 19 films, enough good films for me to feel that I can unequivocally recommend at least four. Despite the expansion of venues mostly outside of Seattle, and the necessity to program over 400 films to show during the festival’s 25 days, the films I saw at this year’s SIFF were pretty consistent in quality to those shown over the previous 3 or 4 years.There were a number of good films, four, five, or six excellent or surprising films, and one or two I wished I hadn’t picked. I had one quibble with this year’s Golden Space Needle Awards, which you’ll see if you read further.
The Third Murder (Hirokazu Kore-eda) Japan
As a Hirokazu Kore-eda fan, when a film by the Japanese writer/director is shown at SIFF it tends to end up on my Best of the Fest list. For the third time in as many years, Kore-eda brought his newest film, The Third Murder, to this year’s SIFF. The film is a bit of a departure for a director who specializes in quiet, funny but also often melancholy, naturalistic dramas about Japanese middle class family life.
Taken at face value, the film appears to be rather conventional. There is a murder, a driven defense attorney takes what seems to be an unwinnable case, the accused has admitted his guilt and the verdict seems preordained. The only question seems to be can the attorney get the charge reduced to save the murderer’s life. So the lawyer, Shigemori, who believes that empathy and understanding are not necessary to defend his client, embarks on his own investigation. His questions lead to more questions. For one thing, his cryptic client keeps changing his story. Was the motivation for the murder money, revenge, or something else? As Shibemori’s picture of his client, Misumi, evolves and becomes more complex, the attorney returns time and again to the detention facility where Misumi is being kept to question his client, and these exchanges with the two men facing each other through a pane of glass are central to the narrative.
Misumi, as portrayed in the film, is both sympathetic and frightening. Over time, Shigemori sheds his shell of objectivity, and his search for some truth about Misumi’s actions that will mitigate or justify his actions becomes an obcession. But can we ever know the truth of such an action? Or as Misumi says, is he one of those people that should never have been born?
Kore-eda’s The Third Murder asks some deep and penetrating questions and leaves it to the audience to decide the answers.
Leave No Trace (Debra Granik) US
At this year’s SIFF, a number of strong films centered around a father/daughter relationship. The one that comes immediately to mind is Golden Space Needle Award Best Film, Eight Grade, with it’s wonderful central performance by Elsie Fisher. The young actress certainly deserved her Best Actress Award. But just as strong a performance, and maybe in a more difficult role, was Thomasin McKenzie’s portrayal of Tom, a thirteen-year-old living with her troubled veteran father off the grid in the forest outside Portland.
The film can be described, wrongly I think, as a minimalist film. Which obscures the fact that it delves deeply into the lives of two people, Tom and her father Will, living on the periphery of society. The film explores the transientness of that type of existence, and it’s lack of connectedness to other people or community. Granik, whose film Winter’s Bone was a major indy film hit in 2010, has a great feel for places and for nature and that feel is a real strength in Leave No Trace. She puts the audience, right there with Tom and Will in their survivalist chanty in the woods, or on the tree farm they are relocated by the authorities after they are forced out of the woods, or at the trailer park of ex-hippies where they stay for a while after they escape back into the woods.
Granik’s films have a great feel for character, and even the minor characters in Leave No Trace seem real, and not stereotypes. Granik has a way of defining those characters with a few words or simple actions. But the audience’s attention is on the films two main characters, Tom (Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie) and Will (Ben Foster), and both actors make their characters come alive.
Theirs is no idillic existence. It is a life on the run, primarily because Will, having suffered some kind of damage while in the military, cannot live in society, even one as accepting as the trailer park in the woods. He does not feel safe, or in control, anywhere except the woods. So at the dramatic center of Leave No Trace is Tom’s growing understanding that she needs and wants more out of life, despite her deep loyalty to her damaged father.
I finally did see Eight Grade in July. Elsie Fisher’s performance is great. But she is the literally the whole film. I was a bit disappointed in the rest of the film, the other characters, including her father, were sketcily drawn, the the structure I found repetitive and boring. I can see why SIFF attendees voted Fisher the Best Actress Award. But, for me, Leave No Trace, was a much more challenging and watchable film, with better all around performances. So, of the films I saw, Leave No Trace would get my vote for Best Film. Best Director (an award shared with Hirokazu Kore-ede), and Best Actress.
The Last Suit (Pablo Solarz) Argentina
When two of his daughters sell the house where he has been living in Buenos Aires, carnky and independent Abraham Bursztein makes a decision to fullfill a promise he made to a best friend who saved his life during the Nazi occupation of Poland. Sneaking away alone he flies to Europe, and once there begins a difficult journey to a place he thought he’d never return, a journey of memory and forgiveness.
Miguel Angel Sola, justifiably won SIFF’s Best Actor Award for his funny and touching portrayal of a proud Jewish tailor making one final journey to repay a debt, and finding along the new hope.
Making the Grade (Ken Wardrop) Ireland
Documentary filmmaker Ken Wardrop’s new film, Making the Grade, takes us into the living rooms, studios, and churches where teachers and their students are preparing for Ireland’s annual piano examinations. 30,000 students take these examination a year. But the film really isn’t about the competition. By focusing on a mixture of teachers and students, a variety of delightful personalities, all ages, both sexes, racially diverse, with different motivations and skills, Wardrop has created a warm, humane, and immensely enjoyable film about the joy of making music. Making the Grade was the one film that really surprised me at this year’s SIFF. The kind of film I hope to discover every year at SIFF, one that makes all the travel and standing in line worth it.