Rowan Sullivan, Author at FilmRoot

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Mi Vida – International Competition – SBIFF

In Mi Vida, a retired hairdresser’s life changes when she travels to Cadiz to take a language course. She falls in love with the city and the escape from her life at home. However, she has to decide between her dreams and her concerned family at home.

Mi Vida is a fairly conventional but enjoyable film about breaking free and following your dreams. Like Under the Tuscan Sun, Lou finds a romanticised Southern European life. Instead of a crumbling Tuscan house overlooking the valley, Lou finds a ‘humble’ rooftop apartment overlooking the cathedral. In the locals she easily finds a new best friend and has someone fall in love with her. She’s living the clichéd Southern European dream many Northern Europeans and North Americans have.

The opening is the only part of the film which breaks convention. Lou navigates her way from the airport to a cramped apartment organised by the language class. Her hosts are a young black family living in a cramped apartment – not the place you’d expect a white retired lady to be. She’s put up in a small room and shares a bathroom with the family – emphasised when the young boy walks into the bathroom whilst Lou is washing her hands. However, to the detriment of the film and in honour of convention, Lou makes up an excuse to leave the apartment and ends up at the clichéd dream rooftop terrace.

The filmmakers dangle this more interesting relationship between an old white lady and a poor black family led by a single mum in front of us, before saying we can’t see it and showing us a relationship between an old white lady and her middle aged Spanish teacher. Why hint at an interesting film before switching to something generic?

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The Retirement – Latin American Competition – SBIFF

This is an Argentinian take of the ‘grumpy old man facing an unwanted situation that forces him to open up his heart’ story. In this case, it’s a old man entering retirement as a widow who wants to be left alone. However, his housekeeper disappears leaving him to look after her young son.

He faces a lot of opposition from his daughter in his choice to take care of the kid on behalf of his housekeeper. The way he spoils him makes his daughter jealous – he’s being the dad she didn’t get have because he was so obsessed with work. As per convention, the grumpy old man learns to love the young boy and opens himself up to learn to love his daughter again.

It’s a heartwarming film about retirement and life as an old widow. Perfect if you don’t want to think much. However, if you’re looking for something more than a film about grumpy old man that is forced to open his heart, you’ll probably be disappointed. The tropes are mostly obvious and expected. And when they’re not, they feel out of place and manipulative – such as the mum going into labour at the kids school (giving Rodolfo an opportunity to show his caring side to his daughter). It’s careful not to tread new territory. Although to be fair, this mid-range silver cinema fare is being budgeted out of Hollywood cinema these days.

Head to our Santa Barbara International Film Festival Hub for more reviews from the Santa Barbara International Film Festival 2020.

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The Restoration – Latin American Competition – SBIFF

The Restoration features Tato, a useless 50 year old cocaine addict that has moved back into his mothers home following his latest divorce. In a moment of misguided ingenuity he decides to sell his bedridden mother’s house (one of the last old houses in Lima) behind her back. To fool her, he recreates her bedroom in a shed in the desert.

In it’s best moments, The Restoration contains a tragic satire of the rapid modernisation of Lima. It’s self aware and able to play comedy off a dark(ish) subject matter with ease, much like Luis Estrada’s El Infierno (which manages to get away with poking fun at the narco-state of Mexico).

However, unfortunately this commentary becomes obscured as the movie chooses to focus on carrying out the ‘magic trick’ of switching Tato’s mum from her old bedroom into a makeshift one without her noticing. It turns the movie from a promising social satire into a relationship comedy of the dying mum and her useless cocaine-addicted son. After beginning the film with a brief commentary on the consequences of Lima’s modernization, the cheap laughs and attempted tugging on heart strings are the easy way to end the film.

Ultimately The Restoration is ends as a somewhat funny Latin film in the realm of the Eugenio Derbez film universe. There’s stereotyped characters, quick laughs, and melodramatic cheesiness. If that sounds like your thing, this film might just be for you.

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Chronology – International Competition – SBIFF

A day after Hakan finds out his wife Nihal cannot conceive, she disappears. The last time he saw her was entering an apartment with a man he doesn’t recognize. In his attempts to find her, he brazenly follows the clues to discover things about his wife that he struggles to come to terms with. In order to find her, he has to dispel his idea of a happy marriage.

The film spends a lot of time building up ambiguous clues, which puts more pressure on a grand reveal to deliver the resolution. Unfortunately it builds expectations so high that when the reveal strikes, it isn’t overly surprising or well thought out. The reveal contradicts a lot of what has been done and said from the first half so it has to revisit every part of it to show you how it matches. The reveal does answer some of the questions from the first half but does leave a lot unanswered, as the second half effectively completely rewrites the first act of the film in a quarter of the time. As a result, it feels rushed and almost unbelievable.

That being said, the film deserves credit for portraying domestic violence. It first portrays a violent but innocent man that we can sympathize with and then a man capable of domestic violence. What is clear is that these two perspectives of the same man are indeed the same man. Just as domestic violence perpetrators are ‘normal’ humans by appearance, but violent husbands at home. If only the rest of the script could have held together through the two parts.

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The Pencil – International Competition SBIFF

The Pencil is bleak. It features an artist that travels to a remote Russian town over 1,000 miles from Moscow to be closer to her partner who’s been wrongly imprisoned there. She becomes a teacher who believes she can make a difference, but has to confront a violent bully.

The teacher is a naive ‘Im going to make a difference’ teacher. She’s the Russian version of Edward James Olmos in Stand and Deliver and Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting. However, unlike the two American films, her class bully is from the criminal family that runs the town. A family that has the police department, prison, school, and any other public services in their pocket. The bully is free to extort and bully both his fellow students and teachers.

Unfortunately for her, her naive beliefs that the bad kid would take to her first art lesson are misguided (she’s obviously never taught before). She doesn’t exactly try to help him either when she says he has no talent in front of the class in their first lesson. From there, her relationship with the bully spirals downhill until the naive hope she had disappears.

The Pencil is shot well. You get a real sense of setting – the isolation from everywhere else (you never see a way out), the juxtaposition of the freedom of nature with the oppressive factories spewing smoke non stop and big run down apartment blocks, and the grey colour palette which is brought to life briefly by the teacher on their art walks.

Secondly, pay attention to the pencils in the film as the film exploits them well. There’s the local factories that create them manned by the working class locals whose kids are being taught to use them to create. Using them instead of creating them gives the kids a way out of the town. It’s also a symbol of the naive teacher’s wish to offer her students a way out, which is easily snapped by the bully in the very first lesson. It’s also no coincidence that the ending features the wood logs that are used to make pencils.

The Pencil is a clever bleak film. However, the bleakness doesn’t present the best picture of Russia. It presents a society without hope that is scared of standing up to the corrupt powers in control. If you can handle hopelessness, it is worth a watch.

P.S. To all the audience members generalising Russian (and Eastern European) film as bleak, please watch more movies before making assumptions. There’s plenty of comedies out there, and plenty of bleak American films that present a bleak picture of the U.S. too.