MIFF 2005 FILM FESTIVAL NOTEBOOK

By Joel Johnson

DAY 6

Swimmers

In the interests of fully disclosing all potential causes for a biased review, I should mention that this film was adopted by my wife and I as part of the Maine International Film Festival’s Adopt-a-Film fundraising program. We chose to adopt the film because my nephew (Matthew W. Johnson) worked on the film in post-production (IQ Artist). Doug Sadler’s Swimmers is the kind of film that we don’t see very often. It is a film about regular working class people. The people are watermen—crab and oyster fisherman—of Maryland’s Eastern Shore. The story is about a family in crisis. The starting point for the audience and the apparent immediate precipitant for the family’s problems is ear trouble that causes 11 year-old Emma (Tara Devon Gallagher), the family’s youngest child and a competitive swimmer, to have to be rescued during a race and to need to have an operation. The family’s lack of health insurance leads the father (Robert Knott) to make a desperate choice for a way to pay for his daughter’s surgery. When this turns into a disaster, all of the faultlines in the family are stressed. Emma’s mom (Cherry Jones) also acts out of desperation as she tries to get the money for her daughter’s healthcare and to keep the floundering family together. There’s also another young woman who shows up in town to claim the home that her mother left her. Water has a sinister connotation for Merrill (Sarah Poulson) who is still suffering from a trauma experienced when she was 11. Merrill attracts the interest of Emma’s brother Clyde (Shawn Hatosy), a police officer, and, eventually, the eldest brother Mike (Michael Mosley). However, her strongest bond is with Emma. Despite the ten year or so age difference between the two, they become very good friends after an initial rough introduction. It would appear that the relationship may benefit Merrill more than Emma because Merrill has little in the way of an emotional support system and this is clearly the healthiest relationship we see her having. This is a slice-of-life film. A lot of little things happen—some good and some bad as the characters cope with adversity. There’s no surprise twist, no big ending, and no incredible effects. This is a drama based on good acting—placing a heavy burden on young Miss Gallagher in the central role of Emma. She delivers an outstanding performance. Swimmers is doing the festival circuit and has already been recognized at the Seattle International Film Festival as the recipient of the New American Cinema Award. It is clearly a film that deserves to find an audience. My wife and I are quite proud of our adopted film.

The Beat My Heart Skipped

Director Jacques Audiard’s The Beat My Heart Skipped is a remake of the American film Fingers (1978) by director James Toback that featured Harvey Keitel. Romain Duris shows his versatility as an actor by taking the Harvey Keitel-role of a man torn between following in his father’s shady tough guy lifestyle or pursuing a career as a concert pianist like his mother. Duris, who has amassed 28 credited performances since 1994, is probably best known to American audiences for his roles in Le Divorce and Auberge L’Espagnole. MIFF and other art cinema regulars may recall that he has appeared in Tony Gatlif’s Gakjo Dilo, Children of the Stork, and this year’s MIFF entry Exils. These films will not have prepared the audience to see Duris as sly and vicious—even if reluctantly. Duris is torn between using his hands to punish—even kill—those who get in the way of the questionably legal schemes of he and his buddies and using his hands for making music. We see him reluctantly called to rescue his ne’er-do-well father (Niels Arestrup) who no longer can provide his own muscle to collect his money. We also see him torn between loyalty to his philandering friend and his affection for the friend’s wife Aline (Aure Atika) who is being deceived. A serendipitous meeting with his late mother’s former agent leads him to begin earnestly practicing the piano that he had virtually abandoned ten years earlier. Desperate for help to prepare for an audition, he secures the services of a beautiful Chinese piano teacher (Linh Dan Pham) with whom he can only communicate in halting English. Jacques Audiard and Tonino Benacquista’s script keeps the action flowing as we see Duris’ Thomas Seyr trying to balance his work, his love life, his unscheduled parental interventions, and his practice time. We become ensnared and begin to care deeply that Thomas succeeds in breaking away from the brutal life in which he is enmeshed. In addition to Duris terrific lead performance and fine support work by the rest of the cast, composer Alexandre Desplat received a Silver Bear Award for Best Film Music at this year’s Berlin Film Festival for his work on this film. This one is definitely going on my shortlist for the Audience Favorite award.

Sundowning

The final film of the day was Jim Cole’s Sundowning. This young man has had four films show at MIFF—including one while he was still a high school student. Clearly, he has shown the most promise of any budding young Maine filmmaker. Sundowning is a very serious film that deals with declining opportunity to be successful working as a fisherman on the Maine coast and with the even more tragic declining memory and function caused by Alzheimer’s Disease. Let me say, upfront, that this review is only a partial review because I only saw about the first 45 minutes of the film. The director was perhaps too successful in establishing a mood of melancholy and sadness. The use of video desaturated of color provides us with imagery that is drained of life. The soundtrack maintains a constant churn of lugubrious strings—during the opening credit sequence this was overpowering and was probably simply up too loud. The story is told at a tortoise-like pace. An unhurried pace can allow the audience to grasp the story’s import, but there is a danger of crossing the line into ponderous. At the 45 minute mark, it appeared that none of the story’s elements—the fishing dispute with Canadians, the declining health of the family patriarch, and the French-Canadian woman neighbor—had truly taken shape. There seemed to be a lack of narrative momentum. Cole had, however, gotten some strong images from the film’s island-setting and from the work on the fishing boat. He had also gotten good performances from his mostly unknown and local cast. The overwhelming sense of sadness the film conveyed plus the personal experience with dementia that has affected both my wife’s and my own family made Sundowning a film experience that we just did not want to experience then.
 

Day 7 -->

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