Ian Barr: The Good, The Bad And The Ugly

I was sick and bedridden for the final few days of TIFF, and though (fortunately) not much was screening for press by then, it's still a bum note to end the fest on. It's worth mentioning that, though; for that stretch of waiting for it to pass, the narrative pleasures of my previous week of viewing faded, while the tactile and sensorial ones prevailed. In particular, the images and sounds from Leviathan, a film from alums of Harvard's aptly-titled Sensory Ethnography Lab.

You don't watch Leviathan so much as get swallowed up and spat out by it, repeatedly, less certain of your orientation to its world with each cycle. “Experimental fishing doco” was the shorthand description I found myself (unhelpfully) reducing the film to for the uninitiated, which observes the activity aboard a commercial fishing boat off a New Bedford coast. “Observes” also seems a hopelessly inadequate descriptor of what co-directors Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel are doing here, attaching an assortment of DV cameras of all sizes and resolutions to fisherman helmets, dead fish, and lines thrown overboard. The resulting footage frequently verges on the purely abstract, with only a few scenes observing the fishermen at work coming close to providing context.

In short, everything a Wikipedia entry couldn't tell you about commercial fishing is here, and more. It's labor viewed from a God's eye view (opening with a portending quote from the Book of Job), assuming every sensorial vantage point imaginable, or least approximations of them – barnacles and starfish and machinery are as valid points of ID as its fisherman, who in this context begin to resemble another, funnier-looking species of fish. In that sense, the film invites interpretation as being about the dehumanising effects of cheap labor in such harsh conditions (rendered extra-harshly), in turn making the film more political than its surface lets on. One of the most intense cinematic experiences in recent memory, Leviathan offers something increasingly rare in contemporary cinema, even the avant-garde: the shock of the new.

On the opposite end of the sensory spectrum is Spring Breakers, the latest provocation from Harmony Korine, which goes surprisingly sublime places for a film whose stunt-casting of Disney channel starlets (Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens) in a prolonged orgy of hedonistic nihilism seems to mark it as little more than pure cinematic novelty. Perhaps it is that too, but Spring Breakers turns out to be quite pointed, starting from its opening sequence of slo-mo beachside bacchanalia – a miasma of young flesh set to Skrillex drops, that goes past pervy and verges on the surreal. Much of the film continues as such, as Korine assumes total identification with the youth-culture American-dream fantasy at its centre – involving a quartet of interchangeable sorority girls who rob a restaurant to fund a spring break vacation – feeling the highs through to the point of utter exhaustion, and finding weird moments of poetry in the process (aided by some of the most beautiful cinematography in recent memory). Consider it Badlands, only replete with copious T&A, peroxide, chroline, dayglo, neon, dubstep aneurysms and substances of every stripe.

Highlights elsewhere were more expected, even when the films themselves didn't adhere to expectations; Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master hasn't the 'money shot' moments or immediate satisfactions of There Will Be Blood, Magnolia or Boogie Nights, but offers a haunting evocation of postwar malaise, and a totally immersive period piece at that (more on it closer to its Australian release date). Pablo Larrain's No, starring Gael Garcia Bernal, about the involvement of ad-men in assisting with TV campaigns to end Pinochet's dictatorship reign over Chile, was one of the funniest and most moving films of the festival; a surprise given the previous two films of Larrain's Pinochet trilogy (Tony Manero and Post Mortem), for all their virtues, were so steadfastly unloveable. Continuing the theme of dictatorship, I only needed a brief synopsis to sell me on The Act of Killing – “unrepentant former members of Indonesian death squads are challenged to re-enact some of their many murders in the style of the American movies they love”. Sure enough, the film builds upon its central conceit in endlessly fascinating, albeit queasy-making ways; initially, paramilitary leader Anwar Congo proudly takes the stage for propaganda purposes, and as he arrives at an entirely different emotional and psychological state, the achievement of this remarkable documentary hits with staggering force.

Of course, there were a lot of mediocre films, too, but it's the really awful ones that stick in the mind more. Disconnect aims to tell us about the dangers of the interwebz, through trite and hysterical storytelling, made extra-insulting in its attempt to critique media sensationalism all while completely succumbing to that exact impulse. Each of its three stories are interwoven and ladled with doleful ambient music, Crash-style, and it does for the internet what that misbegotten Oscar winner did for racism (and what Reefer Madness did for marijuana). There's no form of online communication here that isn't a shortcut to violence – intercut and shown in ultra-slow-motion in an unintentionally hilarious climax – giving the impression of a moral panic PSA film made by a senile luddite. To that demographic, Disconnect will surely register as a probing, insightful investigation of our 'connected' world. At least it's the funniest film to star Jason Bateman in a while.

As awful as the film was, it was neat to be seated near Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan for the screening, who's tackled similar themes to far greater effect throughout his career… wondering what was going through his head made the experience a lot more engaging. The same can be said about the festival in its entirety, where your schedule of 'most anticipated' titles starts to become irrelevant, in the face of the promise of a surprising experience in store at even the lousiest films' screenings. On that note, see ya next year, TIFF.