MIFF 2005 FILM FESTIVAL NOTEBOOK
By Joel Johnson
DAY 7
Producing Adults
Aleksi Salmenperä’s first feature film Producing Adults is
a hybrid. It walks the delicate line between comedy and drama. This ensemble
film scripted by Pekko Pesonen addresses sexuality, relationships, love,
trust, and reproduction that usually are addressed by films in either a
straight-forward dramatic or comedic way. As a foreign-language (Finnish)
film, this mixed approach is an even greater challenge for the audience.
However, the approach taken does allow nearly all the characters to appear
as fully three-dimensional human beings and not as flat caricatures. The
story begins with a 30ish couple Antero (Kari-Pekka Toivonen), an aspiring
Olympic speed skater, and Venla (Minna Haapkylä), a psychologist at a
fertility clinic, having just had a contraceptive failure. Beautiful blonde
Venla is clearly welcoming to a potential child that would move their
relationship beyond just living together. Antero remains firmly committed to
not having children. He shares his concerns about the pitfalls of parenthood
with his chiropractor who is a beleaguered father of several preschool and
grade school-aged children. He then decides to takes steps to ensure this
never befalls him. Another woman Satu (Minttu Mustakallio) who works at
Venla’s clinic is also seeking to become pregnant and begins a sex-only
relationship with the rocker roommate Rönkkö (Tommi Eronen) who lives with
her and her brother Miro (Pekka Strang). Miro, who looks like a Hanson
brother from the Paul Newman film Slapshot (1977), and Rönkkö, who is
obsessed with his lack of height as the reason the taller Satu doesn’t want
a deeper relationship with him, mostly provide comic touches whenever they
appear in the film. The film eventually brings the two women together to use
the clinic’s resources (stored sperm) to help Venla become pregnant. They
end up being discovered by and then receiving unsolicited and unwelcomed
assistance from Claes, the aging bachelor director of their clinic, in
solving Venla’s problems conceiving. Add in Satu’s dying mother Seija (Saara
Pakkasvirta) who wishes to see her single daughter settled in a relationship
and you have a pretty full palette of story elements. In the midst of all
this, a new albeit unconventional bond is being forged between the two women
though each is unsure she is wanted by the other. However, just like a good
mystery, the key to the resolution is the character who doesn’t have any
other purpose. I liked this film quite a bit precisely because it does steer
that path along the edge of comedy and drama. The issues are serious, but
people are funny.
Clean
Our final film of the day was Olivier Assayas’ Clean, a vehicle
Assayas made specifically for his former wife Maggie Cheung. I had wanted to
see this because I had enjoyed Irma Vep (1996), their first
collaboration, so much. The previous evening we had left Sundowning
early and I could only provide a partial review. I did stay to the very end
of Clean, but I would certainly have to acknowledge that I wasn’t
always there. A friend of mine suggested that I could simply make “While I
slept…” my complete commentary on films when I fall asleep—a not altogether
uncommon problem during a film festival. I’m not going to do that. I’ve
pieced together this review from my own observations and observations shared
by fellow cinephiles after the screening. The film starts with Emily
(Cheung) and her fading rock star husband Lee (James Johnston) hitting a
Canadian berg where they meet Lee’s agent Vernon (Don McKellar). Vernon has
made a recording deal for Lee, but Emily complains bitterly that Vernon is
selling Lee short. Later at their motel, Lee and Emily fight and then Lee
acknowledges that he is not producing the quality of music that he feels he
should be doing. Emily goes off, scores some drugs, comes back to share them
with Lee, and then heads off on her own. She spends the night alone in their
car and when she returns to the motel finds that Lee has died of an
overdose. Emily gets busted for possession of narcotics, but denies that she
provided Lee with the lethal drugs. After a six month jail term, Emily tries
to put her far-flung life back together again. The most pressing need is to
reconnect with her son Jay (James Dennis) who has been living with Lee’s
parents (Nick Nolte and Martha Henry). The grandparents are, understandably,
mistrustful of their grandson’s drug addict mother whom the grandmother
particularly blames for her son’s death. They want Emily to become a fit
mother by cleaning up her drug habit. The bulk of the remainder of the film
is following Emily back and forth. She goes to work in a Chinese restaurant
and then a store. She heads to Europe reconnecting with a group of French
women who have problematic relationships with each other. There was Elena
(Beatrice Dalle), Irene (Jeanne Balibar), and Sandrine (Laetitia Spigarelli)
who I had trouble keeping straight since they were all dark-haired beauties.
There seemed, however, no clear reason for them to be in the film. Along the
way, Emily has trouble keeping her nose clean. Nolte, the film’s most
sympathetic character, is the one that seems most invested in having Emily
quit drugs, right her life, and become a good parent for her son. The
problems the film has are many. The music world portrayed in the film is not
entirely convincing. The film seems to keep going from place to place with
multiple location shoots in France, Britain, Canada, and the United States.
For all this moving around, the story never seems to move very far. I
thought maybe I had simply missed it by being asleep, but it seems as though
everyone else missed it, too. Cheung, a fine actress in restrained roles
like In the Mood for Love (2000) and Chinese Box (1997), needed to be
a more incendiary presence as the supposedly out-of-control, self-indulgent
singer. We don’t quite understand why Vernon is telling her when he leaves
her in jail that she should consider him to no longer exist. We don’t have
any back story on her to explain why she is considered so bad. She seems too
agreeable, if not entirely committed to the recovery that we all know she
needs to make. She never quite seems to accept her own culpability in Lee’s
tragic death and never seem to be fully emotionally committed to
reconnecting with her son. We certainly never have the tearful confession
and reconciliation that seems to be needed. While not entirely without
entertainment value, Clean doesn’t accomplish much and would have to be one
of the festival’s few true disappointments.
Additional Review
Puffy Chair
The Puffy Chair is the kind of film that young ambitious filmmakers
attempt. Director Jay Duplass and screenwriter Mark Duplass have made the
anti-romantic comedy. The brothers try to milk humor not from two lovers
being kept apart until the film’s denouement, but from two erstwhile lovers
staying together while we watch their bonds of affection totally unravel.
The set-up is that Josh (Mark Duplass) has bought a giant purple Lazyboy on
eBay for his father’s birthday present. Now he just needs to go and pick it
up. His girlfriend Emily (Kathryn Aselton) and his brother Rhett (Rhett
Jordan) tag along on his trip. The film is set in the South with Atlanta a
destination, but filming in rural Maine is a poor stand-in for Georgia. They
have a series of misadventures—most due to seriously misguided self-centered
behavior. The leads show relative good acting chops, but being credible
using this script is a very tall order. Likewise, the filmmakers demonstrate
technical proficiency in setting up shots and integrating music into the
film. Ultimately, the film fails because the characters who just can’t seem
to stop themselves from saying and doing the wrong things simply are not
sympathetic enough to maintain audience involvement especially as the
relationships clearly begin to self-destruct.
Day 8 -->
