The Long Take: The Recent State of the Sydney Film Festival (2024)
Reviews of what I chose to watch at Australia's biggest film festival, which includes a lot of good efforts and a very bad one.
There has been a lot of talk surrounding the state of movies, following a dire box office for blockbusters. But regardless of the bleak predictions, film festivals seem to be doing fine.I’’ve been going to the Sydney Film Festival for five years and thus far, I’ve only written about my experiences once, which was in 2021, when much of the state returned back to normal after a COVID lockdown that went on for months. From what I can tell, everything is back to normal.
But in the years that I’ve attended this festival, a lot has changed: some of the entries go on into prestige glory, further into the calendar. When Parasite premiered here, it already took the Palme D’Or, but it also took out the top Prize in Sydney before winning more awards, including the Academy Award for Best Picture. In 2022, Triangle of Sadness took the top prize here after winning the top prize at Cannes, and Anatomy of a Fall was also featured here and then experienced similar events. Granted, the top prize won’t go to the most recognizable auteur, but it’s interesting that some of these went that far after their premieres at the Festival.
But the winner of the festival’s top prize have always differed from its glamorous peers, albeit some of them aren’t short of interesting. The first prize winner was Steve McQueen’s Hunger and Nicolas Winding Refn has won twice for Bronson and Only God Forgives, the latter of which split the audience. Yorgos Lanthimos and Miguel Gomes, whose latest efforts are revealed here, have won at the festival with Alps and Arabian Nights. This year, the winner was There’s Still Tomorrow, the Italian black and white comedy that actually beaten Barbie in its opening weekend. I almost saw the movie, but I chose another six that interested more. So here are my takes:
About Dry Grasses - dir. Nuri Bilge Ceylan
The first film I saw was Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s About Dry Grasses, which actually premiered at Cannes last year and won the Best Actress Award for Merve Dizdar. She’s great in it and plays Nuray, a teacher who survived a terrorist attack, where she meets another teacher arriving from Istanbul. They are Samet, a beloved art teacher and his roommate Kenan. Samet face a scandal, following a complaint from two of Samet’s star students and this causes him to have an existential crisis.
Ceylan’s About Dry Grasses clocks in at 200 minutes long and that shouldn’t be a problem. Some of his best work, which includes Once Upon a Time in Anatolia and Winter Sleep, runs in at around three hours and it’s glacially paced. But it can be, at times, thematically unfocused between the main character’s tumultuous relationship with almost everyone at the village and Samet being an asshole for no discernable reason. If you’re going to evaluate the human condition for that length, it shouldn’t provide for two answers. Yet, as usual, Ceylan shoots a lot of visual landscapes, up to the point that there’s a montage of photographs of friends posing at snowy mountains and quiet rivers. A running theme in Ceylan is that the withering of connections, caused by his surrounding structure’s emptiness and embroiled by his own incapabilities. About Dry Grasses does provide one answer, which is that if one fails to take into account his own failings, then he can’t properly walk on another hill ever again.
I Saw The TV Glow - dir. Jane Schoenbrun
Perhaps the one thing this got right is the aesthetic of the 90s show the two leads watched. The show that’s on the glowing TV is The Pink Opaque, which bears the title from a Cocteau Twins’ compilation album, but has the moral compass of Buffy the Vampire Slayer choking on shrooms. But it’s the piece of media that connects two sexually unorthodox teens together and nothing else. This is Jane Schoenbrun’s sophomore effort following We’re Going to The World’s Fair, and it’s a statement about youth alienation, media consumption and nostalgia. The problem is that it fails on those fronts. Yet the bigger issue is that its lazy direction is an excuse for the director’s retched philosophy on cinema.
During Schoenbrun’s filmmaking career, they wrote routinely for Filmmaker Magazine, and upon the election of Donald Trump in November 2016, claim that all filmmaking is and should be political. By that measure, I Saw The TV Glow would have to be scrutinized by their critique, because it has failed to provoke, educate or inspire. It’s designed to be an allegory for transitioning to another gender, but the film assumes you already know the details in how it works. It’s abstract in concept, but it’s certainly giving it a lot more credit and less legwork. There’s no urgency surrounding the subject, and already, any hint of mystery is resolved by these characters realizing that the show sucks as they get older and rewatching it on screen. Profound.
Justice Smith and Brigette Lundy-Paine do not command the screen, so much as they detract you from ever watching its product. Smith’s voiceover is so wooden, that it gives Miranda July’s cat from The Future a run for its money as being the most unlistenable narration heard in an independent movie. Already, the worst part is that the friendship is already empty, presumably because a TV show is the only that’s keeping them together, and the nihilism is just the beginning. It’s the kind of media where it’s able to be dull and tasteless together. Not enough has been said about how much this piece of cinema has found its audience and absolutely fooled them. Stay tuned.
Kinds of Kindness - dir. Yorgos Lanthimos
Love requires cruelty and domination. That is the moral of Yorgos Lanthimos’s triptych of films in Kind of Kindness where Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley and Hong Chau all play different characters who experience this kind of feeling in multiple stories. Take, for example, Jesse Plemons, who won the Best Actor Award at Cannes, and you can certainly see why. He plays these characters deeply trapped in their own relationships. In the first film, he’s a devoted employee, enslaved by his desire to impress his boss. The trouble is that much of his life is connected to his boss’s generosity, which is why any rejection means all of it will go. Plemons plays another character who’s dealing with the loss of his wife, and when she returns, he suspects that it is not her, resulting in a lot of self harm.
Following up to Poor Things with this kind of film, should be a jolt to anyone who vaguely knew of Lanthimos through his prestige phase. The kinetic edge that Kinds of Kindness brings is consistent with Lanthimos’s absurdist approach that aims limits the comfort to the spectator. But the director, reuniting with his Dogtooth screenwriter Efthimis Filippou, brings opaque answers to these questions about love. Luis Bunuel is often referenced in many reviews for this film, but Lanthimos is embodying Kubrick in its surreal film. If this is the type of film Yorgos Lanthimos wanted to make, then he succeeded in embodying the purest version of himself.
A Different Man - dir. Aaron Schimberg
An actor becomes free from neurofibromatosis, only to be outwitted by someone who still remains with the condition. Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man begins by wearing its influences through its sleeves. You can detect hints of Seconds, The Elephant Man or The Fly, but as soon as its star Edward (Sebastian Stan) literally reveals himself to be the hunk that he is, it becomes a class of its own. Sure, it’s inevitable that he has gained some privileges that he never once had: he gets accepted in bars and has it easier picking women, especially his playwright neighbor Ingrid (Renate Reinsve). But then Aaron Pearson, who previously appeared in Schimberg’s Chained For Life, appears out of nowhere and he is far more charismatic, personable than he is.
Stan is really good here, and his exasperation of being used is a good source of bleak humor. Reinsve, who broke out in The Worst Person in the World, plays someone who not only has a false idea of her subject, but would use it to manipulate Edward to advance her self-interests. But the real star here is Aaron Pearson, and he said that his goal in appearing in Under the Skin, was to challenge the stigma of disfigured people depicted in film. In A Different Man, he actively challenges that stigma again by questioning the one-dimensional goals of representation with a more thoughtful exploration of the concept. Throughout the film, Edward is used by everybody, whether or not he has a condition.
Menus-Plasir - Les Troisgros - dir. Frederick Wiseman
Between this and The Taste of Things, 2023/2024 has been a fantastic year for movies specifically about the process of making food. Food porn is perhaps a reductive phrase to describe them, not just because you’re seeing people cook and how much they put care and effort into the making. To boil it down like that only scratches the surface. But the stakes involved is about satisfying a specific set of customers and more importantly, the maker. Frederick Wiseman’s latest documentary Menus-Plaisir - Les Troisgros is about a family managing a Michelin three star restaurant and how three generations of chefs have maintained their franchise.Wiseman is 95 years old, and has more than fourty documentaries about civic institutions without changing the format. A series of establishing shots of buildings and places, before the documentary invests in people doing certain things at the institutions. In an age where the discourse surrounding “crumbling institutions.” It can go for so long, but you learn about the people’s behaviors and how it shapes the institution and gains the viewer’s respect.
This film is four hours long, and not a single second is wasted, which is remarkable considering that the bulk of it involves explaining their philosophy, the procedures of financially maintaining a restaurant and their family history. Yet it’s incredibly immersive, but it shows how strong these institutions are, especially when it’s made with support by the family.
Grand Tour - dir. Miguel Gomes
There’s a sequence in Grand Tour that flows a lot like the Blue Danube sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Instead of a vast, glistening space, we are watching, in slow motion, motorcyclists riding across a roundabout in Vietnam, before it seamlessly transitions to a denizen smiling to the camera. Shot mostly in exquisite black and white, Miguel Gomes’s latest effort Grand Tour earned him the Best Director award and it is an ambitious and meditative look at a separation between Edward and Molly during the British colonial rule that expands through Rangoon, Burma. Edward ponders why he would leave her behind, while Molly pontificates on the aftermath. Grand Tour reveals a distinct and complex identity in its Asian locations and there are many languages spoken here that endures this concept: Portuguese, Vietnamese, Japanese, Chinese, English. But it also demonstrates the truncated narratives that Gomes is interested in and these passages become fascinating in its hypnotic formalities.
Armand - dir. Halfdan Ullhman Tolman
Renate Reinsve continues her streak in me watching her play incredibly flawed female characters. In Halfdan Ulhmann Tolman’s Armand, she plays a single mother, whose son is involved in a devastating incident at his primary school. Reinsve’s Elizabeth goes into the school wearing an exquisite coat, with the meeting involving the victim’s parents, the kids’s well-meaning teacher and once things escalate, the headmaster, who has previously taught one of the parents, as well as Elizabeth’s deceased husband. The incident is bad enough to blow up the school’s past scandals, but also Elisabeth’s relationship with the parents that could be the cause of it.
There’s a ten minute sequence where Elizabeth cackles during the meeting for ten minutes and it’s terrifying to watch. It’s the kind where you react out of stress and exhaustion, rather than anything that is funny. There are parts that don't create a coherent whole, but rather disrupt the flow of things that the pace is thrown off abruptly. Elisabeth is a troublemaker and surely enough Reinsve portrays her breakdown to such a fascinating effect, that anybody else is not interesting enough to hold the film together.
Tolman, who is the grandson of Liv Ullhmann and Ingmar Bergman, won this year’s Camera D’or at the Cannes Film Festival. Barely anything concrete is shown in the film, whether it’s the kids or the scandals that has haunted the schools and that’s certainly by Tolman’s design. The sparse and liminal use of the location reveals a lot of fear from these characters. To the point where it’s a pathway for any cathartic epiphanies, there’s not a lot to it. Armand shows a promising talent, and whatever you think about this film, this should be a starter and hopefully not a fluke for things to come.