Blancanieves (2012)

Blancanieves begins with a series of stills: black and white images of urban Spain in the late-1920s. They prepare us for the journey to come. But look carefully and you’ll see that the stills move: gentle ripples of water in one, rustling leaves in another, and so on. This, too, prepares us. Blancanieves, even its quietest moments, pulses with life.

Sleeper's Wake (2012)

If your script is tragic enough, it doesn’t need to be good. The audience will still be moved.

Actually, I don’t believe that. Or, I don’t want to believe it. But some members of the audience I was part of yesterday, during a screening of Sleeper’s Wake, made we wonder. I heard gasps and oh no’s—expressions of genuine shock. So one might argue that Sleeper’s Wake is good, for it had these people going. But Sleeper’s Wake is not good. Its moments are shocking not just for their content, but from the fact that they come from nowhere. They’re not built up, not prepared for. Which, in turn, makes them necessary to keep the audience engaged. Confused? At times, so was I.

John Wraith (Lionel Newton) is a South African magazine writer; recent victim of a horrible loss. Due to circumstances never fully explained, the SUV he was driving veered off the road, seriously injuring him and killing his wife and only child. He is naturally distraught, unable to work, and close to the bottle. He eventually leaves his house for a secluded chalet in the woods.

I’ve never suffered a tragedy like Wraith’s, but Newton's portrayal of it seemed real enough to me. His character spends the film looking haggard and thin; on the verge of tears much of the time. His alone-time, what we see of it, is gut-wrenching. I believed in John Wraith.

I did not believe in anyone, or anything else in Sleeper’s Wake. The meat of the story is John’s developing relationship with a troubled 17-year-old named Jackie (Jay Anstey); a beautiful girl with a domineering father and no mom. Her mother, we’re told, through conflicting accounts, died during a brutal break-and-enter not long ago.

Jackie’s father, Roelf (Deon Lotz), is a religious zealot who beats her. Or, he’s simply an overwhelmed man of faith with a temper, and the black eye came from someone else. Either interpretation is credible. I’m not sure why director (and screenwriter) Barry Berk put so much emphasis on Roelf’s Christianity, but I suspect it was to make us dislike him. Since it had no relevance to the plot, I drew no such conclusion.

Anstey, as Jackie, is petulant, volatile, and gorgeous. Over the course of several nude scenes and heart-to-heart talks, she manages to seduce the much older John, whose scruples wax and wane. She also reveals to him her version of the events that destroyed her family, and he reciprocates with his own.

These conversations aren’t particularly well-written; worse, they seem interchangeable. If you switched the scenes in which they take place, they would function much the same—revealing a little bit of a backstory that in no way impacts the main plot. The scenes themselves are contrived. One would think that these woods, and mountains, and beaches that John and Jackie traverse and screw in were only a square kilometer in total—because the couple inevitably run into people they know, at exactly the wrong time for them, but the right time for a fidgeting audience.

I don’t demand realism for its own sake. But just as great abstract painters can paint in a realistic way, but choose not to, great screenwriters must ground themselves in what is true, then build upon that. Berk does not. I can believe that a lonely, older man like John, faced with the sight of naked Jay before him, would succumb. I can also believe that John, widowed and once a father of a girl himself, would resist. But I do not believe that he would say no, then proceed to re-clothe the girl, as she stands stock-still, then literally shove her out the door. This makes for a memorable scene, but it’s not real life. It’s not good filmmaking. And it’s typical of Sleeper’s Wake.

Sleeper’s Wake screened Sunday afternoon, August 10, 2012, at Toronto’s Jackman Hall; part of the Toronto International Film Festival.
 

Frances Ha (2012)

I saw Frances Ha last night with a friend. He loved it. “This is how people actually talk,” he told me on the way out. He feels that way about Noah Baumbach’s other films too. But I don’t.

It’s been hours now and I’m still bothered by that. Not by Frances Ha itself, which I think is a fine film, at least for some people, starring Greta Gerwig in certainly the most delicate, sympathetic and charming role I’ve seen her in. I’m more concerned about my friend’s claim. We grew up in the same town and now live in the same city. We don’t share quite the same social circles, but we’re not that different. And yet, watching Frances Ha last night, I kept thinking: “Nobody talks this way.”

Most of the men and women in Frances Ha are young and smart. They’re New Yorkers in their late-20s, on the cusp of maturity, which excites and frightens them. Furthermore, they know it—they know that they’re excited and frightened, I mean—and so they chatter away with a breeziness and cleverness they know is a front. This I can accept. But Baumbach is so insistent on this tone—this ironic detachment from nearly every line—that it’s elevated to a stylized speech. To me, Baumbach’s snark is less a mirror held up to life than the Millennial version of the gunshot declarative of Film Noir.

I can’t call this a negative; I can only say it’s not for me. Frances Ha will probably make you laugh. It’s a comedy composed of wise observations, populated with true little moments, including one where Frances, desperate to get cash quickly from an ATM, still hovers her finger over the “Yes/No” transaction charge screen in hesitation. I’ve done that. I’ve also experienced the same, weird sense of loss that Frances does when her longtime friend and roommate moves out and onto a very different life, leaving Frances lonely, and unsure if she’s headed in the right direction, or really, any direction at all.

Gerwig is beautiful in this film. Fragile too. I felt for her character, wanted to believe in her, in the truth of her, and sometimes did. But the self-awareness of the material kept us apart. You will like this film for Gerwig even if you don’t like the film. You may also like that it’s in black and white, and partly shot in Paris, and feels like it knows that it looks like something made in France in the Fifties.

Frances Ha was not for me. But I’ll leave you with the moment that moved me most—a little one that occurred about halfway through the film, when Frances was bottoming out. In her bedroom, late at night, depressed and drunk, Frances lies down on her bed to stop the spins. She turns her head to one side. And then, Baumbach captures Gerwig’s face in closeup. In that moment, at least to me, she looked just like Grace Kelly. And there was no irony to Grace Kelly.

Frances Ha screened Friday night, August 8, 2012, at the Ryerson Theatre in Toronto, part of the Toronto International Film Festival.