Rowan Sullivan

216

The Clash – Spain/Latin American Competition – SBIFF

Roberto, an 18 year old boy, joins his father in Montreal to escape the violence in Peru. His father, now Bob Montoya, fled Peru a few years earlier and now lives with his Canadian wife and daughter. The Clash shows both the culture clash for Roberto and the macho clash with his now Canadian father. It plays out a bit like a Martin Rejtman film in which the oddball humour has been switched out for a tense underlying machismo.

The arrival of Roberto is a challenge to Bob’s male pride. We don’t know how much of a success Bob was in Peru, but he’s desperate to present himself as a success story in Canada. Roberto obviously knows where he came from in Peru so Bob wants to show him how far he’s come. Roberto is the medium for Bob to prove himself to people back in Peru.

In order to maintain his image, he tries to sell how great Canada is to his son. He keeps telling him it’s a place where you can be anything, a place where you can make lots of money. He portrays himself as a businessman that is one step away from the next big deal with a nice house and a nice car. However, the house, the car, and his suit are all for show. The nice house and car that he ‘owns’ are really his wife’s and his suit is just a image that covers up the debts he’s incurring.

Like Uncle Rico in Napoleon Dynamite, Bob Montoya resorts to machismo to present himself as a big man. Whilst he’s grateful to have his son with him – as it’s a chance to prove to someone he’s achieved the American dream – he also sees him as a challenge to his masculinity. He’s a new male figure in the house that takes some of his wife’s and mistress’ attention away from him.

Their relationship fits Freud’s Oedipus complex theory. Bob is the father figure that dominates the household. Roberto is the son that reluctantly lives within the rules his father sets. They rarely talk beyond a few awkward words as Roberto lives in silence. Bob asserts his male dominance over Roberto by kissing his wife and his mistress in front of his son. In contrast, Roberto has fantasies of hooking up with his father’s mistress. In a final awkward party, Roberto battles his father for a dance with his mistress. It’s only in the club when he’s drunk that he can overcome his ‘castration anxiety‘. However, his father never allows her to dance with him in order to preserve his position as the alpha male.

The Clash is a brilliantly awkward film about a father and his son battling to prove their masculinity in a place foreign to the both of them.

217

Stitches – International Competition – SBIFF

In Stitches, a mother restarts her own investigation into the death of her newborn son 18 years ago. She believes he was stolen from her and that he’s potentially still alive. However, she has to also prove the police, her friends, and her family that she’s not insane.

The film spends most of its run time following the mother’s investigation. While she’s investigating, the audience also has to figure out if she’s crazy or not. She’s not the most engaging or sympathetic of characters as she doesn’t say anything to her family or friends. Her face is always blank and emotionless. We can only start to sympathise with her when her investigations are vindicated in some of the records she uncovers.

From that point on, the way she has to try to convince her family and friends of the truths she’s uncovered follows the routine of horror films:

  1. The main character knows something the audience doesn’t.
  2. The audience learns/sees something which makes them understand the main character.
  3. The main character struggles to convince her friends and family.
  4. Eventually, they prove something to a close family member or friend.
  5. That friend or family member shows/convinces everyone else.

However, unfortunately there few things that let down the film for me. Firstly, I was never sold on the main character. Her face is expressionless for the whole film, making her hard to sympathise with or care about. Her actions and movements in contrast to her blank expression were always very obvious and rigid, which made them appear forced and unnatural, drawing attention to her role as an actor.

Secondly, it would have been good to have more background about the mother. it’s not clear why the lady starts the film so depressed all of a sudden. 18 years have passed, so why is she not talking to her daughter and suddenly so concerned to find her missing son again. It would also be good to know why she was put into a mental asylum and how she managed to get out and reintegrate herself into her family and society.

Lastly, I found the editing and cinematography of Stitches a bit off-putting. There were a lot of scenes with one character in clear focus with everything in the background blurred. In itself this works, but these shots were often cut with mid range shots where everything was in focus, making the editing feel a bit disjointed.

Overall Stitches covered an interesting story, but because of the hard to sympathise with feature character, I never got fully engaged in her investigation.

218

The Flying Circus – International Competition – SBIFF

In The Flying Circus, four lads from Kosovo receive an invitation from the Albanian National Theatre to put on their latest play for their festival. Problem is, to get there, they need to cross two borders illegally. They have to escape Serbian occupied Kosovo, sneak through Monetenegro, before crossing illegally into Albania.

It’s a funny ‘based on a true story’ escape/road trip film set in a divided Balkans. It manages to convey the seriousness of their journey, but lightened with humour. The only unnecessary addition to the film is the cliched holiday relationship between one of the actors and a woman from Tirana. It just feels too quick, underdeveloped, and unnecessary.

The humour comes from the strange situations and people the four actors stumble into and how they deal with them. For example, there’s the threatening episode when the Kosovars traveling from Kosovo are all threatened by a trio of skinheads in a restaurant. One of the skinheads brings out a gun to which one of the four actors smashes his hands on two glasses (as he saw in a movie earlier). It turns a threatening situation into something absurd to laugh at. In these comedic moments you almost forget that they’re on the run and their lives are under threat.

The Flying Circus also offers a glimpse of life as a Kosovar in the Balkans. At home there are routine ID checks of ethnic Albanians and officials speaking Serbian instead of the local Albanian. This sets up what they’re due to face later on. On the road, they face further checks – made by grumpy officials speaking Serbian, and they’re threatened by a local in Montenegro. All the signs show that the Kosovars are looked down upon both at home and abroad. This doesn’t change when they make it to Albania either, where the officials are corrupt and inept.

Overall, The Flying Journey is a fun journey, on a similar level to Taika Waititi’s Hunt for the Wilderpeople. It’s got funny characters, humor in unlikely situations, and a happy-ish ending.

219

Mosh – International Competition – SBIFF

Mosh is an aspiring dancer living in the hood in the Dominican Republic. She lives with her mother who is dying from cancer and her cousin Geronimo, who gets by dealing drugs.

Not sure what to make of it. Mosh starts of as if it’s going to be a musical but then changes direction into a hood film after the opening. It features some of the typical hood film tropes: a kid trying to make it out of the hood, a raw undiscovered talent, relative stuck in a gang. But it also features a few scenes of a tall lady playing God, who’s followed around by a man dressed as a pineapple.

God and her pineapple friend appear to characters to talk about death and nostalgia for a life lived. She helps each of the characters become more comfortable with the idea of death. However, whilst the talks are interesting, they never really fit within the main(?) narrative of the film – that of Mosh and her family (question mark as maybe Mosh isn’t the focus?). The discussions are also pretty long and slow which disrupts the flow of the film further. (Even the characters annoyingly start to interrupt themselves as the discussions about mortality and life starts drifting without focus).

I really wanted to like Mosh, but I could never understand what kind of a film it was trying to be. It has too many moving parts. Instead of focusing on one narrative, it tries to follow many (Mosh, her brother, her mother, the drug boss).

There’s also a lot of unanswered questions. Why does Mosh so vehemently correct anyone who calls her Maria? What is this happiness drug? Why does God keep appearing? Why does she have a side kick dressed as a pineapple? We’re also never clear on why Mosh loves dancing and why she is going to all these dance classes and auditions – is she auditioning for a role? Does she want to make it her career? Is it her way of escaping her reality? It’s never really clear. We just have to assume or accept a lot of things that we are shown.

As a result, we’re never really sure what the film is. The convoluted narrative, varied pace, and unanswered questions make it hard to immerse yourself in the film. We never feel like we know Mosh, but we’re also never sure if this film is actually about her, her brother, the hood, or God.

220

If Only – International Competition – SBIFF

In If Only, Alma and her older brothers are sent to Rome to spend New Years skiing with their dad. Life with him is a world apart from their mother. He’s a disorganised failing scriptwriter with a young partner whilst their mother is a converted orthodox Christian with a strict husband. Instead of skiing, which is just a front to show his ex wife he is a success, he takes them to his friend’s beach house.

By the beach, the kids make friends with some of the locals whilst their father and his younger partner argue, make love, and write. They are your typical dysfunctional family.

Nothing much happens in If Only which feels for the most part like your typical light hearted Italian art house film. As a result, it’s quite hard to describe. However, it succeeds because of the performances of Alma, her dad and his partner.

Alma, the 8 year old daughter, has the benefit of the narrative voice, which she uses to comically picture her dreams of reuniting her mother and father. She’s the naive one – always blissfully unaware of her fathers current relationship with his partner and her and her brothers. Her rose tinted glasses make this a heart warming disfuncional family film rather than a more depressing one.

Her dad plays the stereotypical Italian dad. He’s all over the place and always emotional. One second he’s writing and angry at anyone who disturbs him, the next he’s a loving dad that’s present but will disappear in another second. His partner plays a free loving, spontaneous woman that doesn’t shy away from anything. However she’s always the one in control vs. Alma’s dad.

The other two brothers don’t offer too much, apart from two events which the director uses to help bring the film to a close.

Ultimately, If Only is a nice coming of age Italian art house film featuring a dysfunctional family. It’s a light and enjoyable watch. However, outside of the three characters, there isn’t much to distinguish it from other films in the genre.