And now, what I saw on the weekend. Find part 1 here.
The final film I saw at the festival was a "Secret Screening," and in accordance with the festival staff's wishes, I will not be revealing which film it was. Apparently, due to festival politics which are somehow related to "World Premiere" status, they could only get the film if they hid its identity, and it was even preceded by a video from the director explaining this problem. It's a shame, too, because this was a very interesting movie which, while I didn't entirely enjoy it, is strange enough that I'm dying to talk about it. However, I don't want to end this festival diary on a mystery, which is why I'm mentioning this first, before all the films I can talk about.
The final film I saw at the festival was a "Secret Screening," and in accordance with the festival staff's wishes, I will not be revealing which film it was. Apparently, due to festival politics which are somehow related to "World Premiere" status, they could only get the film if they hid its identity, and it was even preceded by a video from the director explaining this problem. It's a shame, too, because this was a very interesting movie which, while I didn't entirely enjoy it, is strange enough that I'm dying to talk about it. However, I don't want to end this festival diary on a mystery, which is why I'm mentioning this first, before all the films I can talk about.
A much more recent headliner is American Animals, the second feature from Bart Layton, director of 2012's acclaimed The Imposter. However, where Layton's previous film had the inherently intriguing premise of an obvious impostor going unacknowledged, the new film merely applies modest Rashomon documentary elements to a fairly mundane failed-heist film. American Animals tells the true story of how Warren Lipka (Evan Peters) assembled a team of his college peers to pull an art heist, comprising Spencer Reinhard (Barry Keoghan), Eric Borsuk (Jared Abrahamson), and Chas Allen (Blake Jenner). These stories are told partially through interview, but much more of the film consists of reenactments.
Layton doesn't have many twists in store for this narrative, despite some Rashomon-type contradictions early on, and the themes he arrives at aren't terribly novel. Despite the film's insistence that "This is a true story," it's not quite clear what Layton saw in it, and while he pulls a stylish and eventful drama from the events, it's also a fairly mundane one, and while its first half is at least humorous and lively, the film starts to drag as its protagonists start to consider the consequences of their plans. American Animals is at least generous enough to maintain forward momentum, but even when it tries to put its story in thematic context, all it can really offer is a rote idea about the adolescent desire for adventure and a few tepid questions about his protagonists' intentions.
Nonetheless, the film benefits greatly from a sharp aesthetic, which is suitably atmospheric and remains uniform across both the interviews and the reenactments. Layton's style here is distinctive without being distracting, and it's perhaps the most polished-looking film playing in the entire festival. Additionally, the cast is uniformly great, capably handling both the amusing banter of the first half and the increasing dread and doubt of the second. Having both the genuine article and these performers in the same movie does emphasize all the differences in appearance between the two, but that level of artifice is to some extent purposeful, as the reenactments often serve as an expression of the story rather than something more self-contained. Alas, neither mode is quite enough to derive purpose from this story, and whatever fun there is to have in the first half cannot sustain the whole movie. (6/10)
On the other end of the scale is Pascal Plante's lo-fi Fake Tattoos, a sort of indie romcom with a melancholic undercurrent. On his 18th birthday, Theo (Anthony Therrien) is spending the night alone after a punk concert when he meets Mag (Rose-Marie Perreault), with whom he has an immediate connection. However, Theo will need to move at the end of the summer to live with his sister in a small town, so his days in Montreal are limited, and thus so are those with Mag. They attempt to make the best of it in the weeks they have left.
Fake Tattoos rests largely on its immensely charming love story, anchored by the great chemistry between Therrien and Perreault and by a consistently funny script. Rather than a running plot, the film comprises a variety of smaller stories, beginning with Theo and Mag growing to know each other and continuing from there. Early on, it's apparent that Theo has a somehow complicated relationship with his family, and the closest the film gets to an overarching progression is watching its down grow progressively bittersweet as small, vague hints of his past emerge. Although we never learn exactly what the cause of his problems are, the broad implication that a problem exists invites projection and increasingly affects the film's atmosphere in emotionally evocative ways.
Alas, the lack of detail means that certain relationships are only partially developed, and while we eventually see both Theo's mother and his sister, they don't get as much focus as his relationship with Meg, which in turn prevents the film from becoming much more than a solid doomed-romance film. There's always the hint that a greater emotional core is right around the corner, but it only emerges in fleeting glances. Nonetheless, there's a tenderness and authenticity to the film which provides texture many films can only dream of, and the charms of Fake Tattoos remain irresistible from start to finish. Not every film needs to transcend itself. (7/10)
CUFF also screened two shorts packages, of which I saw the one titled "A Turn for the Worse," which collected shorts somehow linked to the titular theme, no matter how indirectly. For the most part, these were bland horror shorts which just barely ran long enough to offer a single idea, and which rarely even had a distinct enough idea to stand out. Welcome to Bushwick, The Good Samaritan, Penny Whistle, and Rearview all run under 10 minutes, with the last of those only being 3 minutes long. Of these, only The Good Samaritan offers a premise with any legs: a woman living in the woods tricks drivers into thinking she needs help, then she lures them away and murders them. Even then, the 6-minute running time simply isn't long enough to develop either tension or insight, and the short's potential goes unrealized.
Such brief shorts are hard to grade, as they waste little time and don't offer especially high ambitions. The exception is Gonçalo Almeida's Thursday Night (8/10), a mesmerizing, droning canine ghost story which chronicles a dog chasing paranormal visions throughout its house. It runs only 8 minutes, but it's as narratively enigmatic and aesthetically stylized as many features, with its only major flaw being the subjective appeal of the dogs themselves. You can only be so creepy when your whole cast is cute dogs, but that also adds an extra layer of charm onto the already compelling short. I can't wait for this to premiere online.
Less appealing is the brief, surreal animation 1st Day & Next Minute, which offers up a sort of abstracted sexual experience which is too distorted to come across as anything other than pointlessly disturbing. I mean, it features a character with an extra face on their torso, with a tongue where genitalia would otherwise be. Unlike the horror shorts, it's hardly forgettable, but it's not terribly appealing either, and it's similarly too short and tossed-off to really grade.
More appealing are the comedic shorts Lunch Ladies and Stay (both 7/10). The former revolves around two high school lunch ladies who are determined to become Johnny Depp's personal chefs, and the latter of which involves a cultist having a sexual relationship with the demon she summoned. Both are distinctly lowbrow, but the former is appealingly ridiculous, and the latter is brief enough that its quirky idea doesn't get old. Additionally, both feature a surprise dark turn, which in the former case is suitably over-the-top and in the latter case fits the general tone. Neither is particularly classy or sophisticated, but hey, I laughed.
On the other hand, I'm not comfortable giving an opinion on Harry Lighton's Wren Boys, for I was unable to parse the performers' heavy accents and thus most likely missed a lot of significant dialogue. The overarching plot, which is clear enough, revolves around a Catholic priest driving his nephew to prison, with a whole some romantic twist as well as a surprise dark ending. Alas, notable portions of motivation were lost on me, and as such I must abstain from commenting further.
I can, however, discuss Arnaud Bigeard's murder drama We Are Going Into the Woods (6/10), which is based on a man named Fabrice killing a man whom his wife had been having an affair with, not knowing that his brother Wim was watching. While it spends a little time lingering on Wim stewing in his knowledge, it's ultimately fairly straightforward, trudging along predictably until it reaches an unsurprisingly grim ending. Certainly, there are provocative implications in the turns this story makes, but the telling is altogether somewhat dry.
Alas, I was not very fond of Issa Lopez's festival hit Tigers Are Not Afraid, a peculiar mixture between a dark fantasy picture and a child-gang drama set near the dangerous Mexican border. One day, Estrella (Paola Lara) returns home to find her mother missing. Somewhere in the interim, she acquires three pieces of chalk which can each supposedly grant her one wish, and she begins hearing the voices of the dead. She eventually falls in with a gang of orphan boys, whose trust she needs to win against the danger of a local gang called the Huascas, who are hunting the boys because one of them stole an iPhone from them.
There's a gritty realism to the setting, and it's certainly hard to not be somewhat affected by these kids' unfortunate situation, but the emotional turns it takes are either manipulative, predictable, or both, and only Estrella and the hardened orphan leader really stand out from the otherwise indistinguishable group. There's a certain appeal to the film's mix of brutality and sweetness, and at times it can be genuinely moving, but many of the early emotional beats in particular are overwrought, and even those which are more effective remain somewhat cheesy. The supernatural horror mixes surprisingly well with the social realism, but it fails to liven up the tedious narrative. If nothing else, the kids all give surprisingly solid, mature performances, and deserve attention for that.
There are a lot of imaginative special effects on display here, including cute little touches like a tiny dragon which flies out of phones and a creepy stream of blood which follows Estrella around. Alas, while these effects are usually clear, there's still too many instances where they're obscured by the film's crummy lighting. As far as I can tell, all of the lighting in Tigers Are Not Afraid is natural, and while this is often used to decent effect, every once in a while it becomes hard to see what's actually going on. More importantly, the all-handheld photography plays a significant part in flattening the film's tone, as it shakes significantly even when it's just focused on a close up of an actor talking. It's often distracting, and gets in the way of scenes which should be tense. Even when the film finally gains some dramatic heft, its aesthetic failures get in the way. (5/10)
By contrast, the appeal of Ian Lagarde's All You Can Eat Bouddha is almost purely aesthetic, as its deliberately ambiguous and opaque narrative is only as strong as the surprises contained within. An episodic story, the film focuses on Mike (Ludovic Berthillot), a mysterious tourist who decides to stay at the Palacio resort in the Caribbean and immediately gains the attention of the other guests. As the resort staff accommodate him and his voracious appetite, a peculiar decline transpires, both in the resort and in Mike's health, the former seemingly related to civil unrest.
In truth, the film's narrative is hard to grasp, as much of it is devoid of context if not outright surreal. That's not to say there's no appeal in the script, as it's consistently mysterious and surprising, filled with strange incidents ranging from one guest speaking French in a distracting American accent to Mike apparently forging a metaphysical bond with an octopus he saved, who is intermittently seen attempting to invite Mike to join her into the ocean. On some occasions, like that of the octopus, it can get a little silly, but often it appears the humour is intentional. Alas, one of these peculiar events is that nearly every woman at the resort falls for Mike, which is a comparatively trite and sexist trope in an otherwise wildly unpredictable film.
As befits its artsy nature, All You Can Eat Bouddha looks absolutely gorgeous, thanks in part to its tropical location but also due to a procession of stunning frames. The film employs numerous tricks, including a handful of bewildering transitions, and combined with a sound design which emphasizes the noises of the tropics, the result is a hypnotic flow which even the goofiest onscreen incidents can't break. If the film is thematically hard to grasp, it's not for a lack of ideas. Rather, there are many concepts hinted at by Lagarde's peculiar images, but they don't necessarily coalesce. Instead, this is a film best appreciated by someone with a taste for the strange and abstract; its joys are in its aesthetic beauty and genuine weirdness. (7/10)
And that ends this year's Calgary Underground Film Festival. Of what I saw, I most recommend You Were Never Really Here and Revenge, which both have set release dates, as well as Let the Corpses Tan and Fake Tattoos, which do not, and All You Can Eat Bouddha, which I'm not convinced will receive distribution at all. CUFF is small, and doesn't offer a wide range of major festival hits, but it still offers a diverse range of films, and what I saw ranged from gruesome genre fare to ambiguous art films to low-key indie dramas. For adventurous moviegoers, the festival experience is indispensable, as it's the best opportunity to see movies you may not otherwise have heard of. All cinephiles should at least attend one.
Layton doesn't have many twists in store for this narrative, despite some Rashomon-type contradictions early on, and the themes he arrives at aren't terribly novel. Despite the film's insistence that "This is a true story," it's not quite clear what Layton saw in it, and while he pulls a stylish and eventful drama from the events, it's also a fairly mundane one, and while its first half is at least humorous and lively, the film starts to drag as its protagonists start to consider the consequences of their plans. American Animals is at least generous enough to maintain forward momentum, but even when it tries to put its story in thematic context, all it can really offer is a rote idea about the adolescent desire for adventure and a few tepid questions about his protagonists' intentions.
Nonetheless, the film benefits greatly from a sharp aesthetic, which is suitably atmospheric and remains uniform across both the interviews and the reenactments. Layton's style here is distinctive without being distracting, and it's perhaps the most polished-looking film playing in the entire festival. Additionally, the cast is uniformly great, capably handling both the amusing banter of the first half and the increasing dread and doubt of the second. Having both the genuine article and these performers in the same movie does emphasize all the differences in appearance between the two, but that level of artifice is to some extent purposeful, as the reenactments often serve as an expression of the story rather than something more self-contained. Alas, neither mode is quite enough to derive purpose from this story, and whatever fun there is to have in the first half cannot sustain the whole movie. (6/10)
On the other end of the scale is Pascal Plante's lo-fi Fake Tattoos, a sort of indie romcom with a melancholic undercurrent. On his 18th birthday, Theo (Anthony Therrien) is spending the night alone after a punk concert when he meets Mag (Rose-Marie Perreault), with whom he has an immediate connection. However, Theo will need to move at the end of the summer to live with his sister in a small town, so his days in Montreal are limited, and thus so are those with Mag. They attempt to make the best of it in the weeks they have left.
Fake Tattoos rests largely on its immensely charming love story, anchored by the great chemistry between Therrien and Perreault and by a consistently funny script. Rather than a running plot, the film comprises a variety of smaller stories, beginning with Theo and Mag growing to know each other and continuing from there. Early on, it's apparent that Theo has a somehow complicated relationship with his family, and the closest the film gets to an overarching progression is watching its down grow progressively bittersweet as small, vague hints of his past emerge. Although we never learn exactly what the cause of his problems are, the broad implication that a problem exists invites projection and increasingly affects the film's atmosphere in emotionally evocative ways.
Alas, the lack of detail means that certain relationships are only partially developed, and while we eventually see both Theo's mother and his sister, they don't get as much focus as his relationship with Meg, which in turn prevents the film from becoming much more than a solid doomed-romance film. There's always the hint that a greater emotional core is right around the corner, but it only emerges in fleeting glances. Nonetheless, there's a tenderness and authenticity to the film which provides texture many films can only dream of, and the charms of Fake Tattoos remain irresistible from start to finish. Not every film needs to transcend itself. (7/10)
CUFF also screened two shorts packages, of which I saw the one titled "A Turn for the Worse," which collected shorts somehow linked to the titular theme, no matter how indirectly. For the most part, these were bland horror shorts which just barely ran long enough to offer a single idea, and which rarely even had a distinct enough idea to stand out. Welcome to Bushwick, The Good Samaritan, Penny Whistle, and Rearview all run under 10 minutes, with the last of those only being 3 minutes long. Of these, only The Good Samaritan offers a premise with any legs: a woman living in the woods tricks drivers into thinking she needs help, then she lures them away and murders them. Even then, the 6-minute running time simply isn't long enough to develop either tension or insight, and the short's potential goes unrealized.
Such brief shorts are hard to grade, as they waste little time and don't offer especially high ambitions. The exception is Gonçalo Almeida's Thursday Night (8/10), a mesmerizing, droning canine ghost story which chronicles a dog chasing paranormal visions throughout its house. It runs only 8 minutes, but it's as narratively enigmatic and aesthetically stylized as many features, with its only major flaw being the subjective appeal of the dogs themselves. You can only be so creepy when your whole cast is cute dogs, but that also adds an extra layer of charm onto the already compelling short. I can't wait for this to premiere online.
Less appealing is the brief, surreal animation 1st Day & Next Minute, which offers up a sort of abstracted sexual experience which is too distorted to come across as anything other than pointlessly disturbing. I mean, it features a character with an extra face on their torso, with a tongue where genitalia would otherwise be. Unlike the horror shorts, it's hardly forgettable, but it's not terribly appealing either, and it's similarly too short and tossed-off to really grade.
More appealing are the comedic shorts Lunch Ladies and Stay (both 7/10). The former revolves around two high school lunch ladies who are determined to become Johnny Depp's personal chefs, and the latter of which involves a cultist having a sexual relationship with the demon she summoned. Both are distinctly lowbrow, but the former is appealingly ridiculous, and the latter is brief enough that its quirky idea doesn't get old. Additionally, both feature a surprise dark turn, which in the former case is suitably over-the-top and in the latter case fits the general tone. Neither is particularly classy or sophisticated, but hey, I laughed.
On the other hand, I'm not comfortable giving an opinion on Harry Lighton's Wren Boys, for I was unable to parse the performers' heavy accents and thus most likely missed a lot of significant dialogue. The overarching plot, which is clear enough, revolves around a Catholic priest driving his nephew to prison, with a whole some romantic twist as well as a surprise dark ending. Alas, notable portions of motivation were lost on me, and as such I must abstain from commenting further.
I can, however, discuss Arnaud Bigeard's murder drama We Are Going Into the Woods (6/10), which is based on a man named Fabrice killing a man whom his wife had been having an affair with, not knowing that his brother Wim was watching. While it spends a little time lingering on Wim stewing in his knowledge, it's ultimately fairly straightforward, trudging along predictably until it reaches an unsurprisingly grim ending. Certainly, there are provocative implications in the turns this story makes, but the telling is altogether somewhat dry.
Alas, I was not very fond of Issa Lopez's festival hit Tigers Are Not Afraid, a peculiar mixture between a dark fantasy picture and a child-gang drama set near the dangerous Mexican border. One day, Estrella (Paola Lara) returns home to find her mother missing. Somewhere in the interim, she acquires three pieces of chalk which can each supposedly grant her one wish, and she begins hearing the voices of the dead. She eventually falls in with a gang of orphan boys, whose trust she needs to win against the danger of a local gang called the Huascas, who are hunting the boys because one of them stole an iPhone from them.
There's a gritty realism to the setting, and it's certainly hard to not be somewhat affected by these kids' unfortunate situation, but the emotional turns it takes are either manipulative, predictable, or both, and only Estrella and the hardened orphan leader really stand out from the otherwise indistinguishable group. There's a certain appeal to the film's mix of brutality and sweetness, and at times it can be genuinely moving, but many of the early emotional beats in particular are overwrought, and even those which are more effective remain somewhat cheesy. The supernatural horror mixes surprisingly well with the social realism, but it fails to liven up the tedious narrative. If nothing else, the kids all give surprisingly solid, mature performances, and deserve attention for that.
There are a lot of imaginative special effects on display here, including cute little touches like a tiny dragon which flies out of phones and a creepy stream of blood which follows Estrella around. Alas, while these effects are usually clear, there's still too many instances where they're obscured by the film's crummy lighting. As far as I can tell, all of the lighting in Tigers Are Not Afraid is natural, and while this is often used to decent effect, every once in a while it becomes hard to see what's actually going on. More importantly, the all-handheld photography plays a significant part in flattening the film's tone, as it shakes significantly even when it's just focused on a close up of an actor talking. It's often distracting, and gets in the way of scenes which should be tense. Even when the film finally gains some dramatic heft, its aesthetic failures get in the way. (5/10)
By contrast, the appeal of Ian Lagarde's All You Can Eat Bouddha is almost purely aesthetic, as its deliberately ambiguous and opaque narrative is only as strong as the surprises contained within. An episodic story, the film focuses on Mike (Ludovic Berthillot), a mysterious tourist who decides to stay at the Palacio resort in the Caribbean and immediately gains the attention of the other guests. As the resort staff accommodate him and his voracious appetite, a peculiar decline transpires, both in the resort and in Mike's health, the former seemingly related to civil unrest.
In truth, the film's narrative is hard to grasp, as much of it is devoid of context if not outright surreal. That's not to say there's no appeal in the script, as it's consistently mysterious and surprising, filled with strange incidents ranging from one guest speaking French in a distracting American accent to Mike apparently forging a metaphysical bond with an octopus he saved, who is intermittently seen attempting to invite Mike to join her into the ocean. On some occasions, like that of the octopus, it can get a little silly, but often it appears the humour is intentional. Alas, one of these peculiar events is that nearly every woman at the resort falls for Mike, which is a comparatively trite and sexist trope in an otherwise wildly unpredictable film.
As befits its artsy nature, All You Can Eat Bouddha looks absolutely gorgeous, thanks in part to its tropical location but also due to a procession of stunning frames. The film employs numerous tricks, including a handful of bewildering transitions, and combined with a sound design which emphasizes the noises of the tropics, the result is a hypnotic flow which even the goofiest onscreen incidents can't break. If the film is thematically hard to grasp, it's not for a lack of ideas. Rather, there are many concepts hinted at by Lagarde's peculiar images, but they don't necessarily coalesce. Instead, this is a film best appreciated by someone with a taste for the strange and abstract; its joys are in its aesthetic beauty and genuine weirdness. (7/10)
And that ends this year's Calgary Underground Film Festival. Of what I saw, I most recommend You Were Never Really Here and Revenge, which both have set release dates, as well as Let the Corpses Tan and Fake Tattoos, which do not, and All You Can Eat Bouddha, which I'm not convinced will receive distribution at all. CUFF is small, and doesn't offer a wide range of major festival hits, but it still offers a diverse range of films, and what I saw ranged from gruesome genre fare to ambiguous art films to low-key indie dramas. For adventurous moviegoers, the festival experience is indispensable, as it's the best opportunity to see movies you may not otherwise have heard of. All cinephiles should at least attend one.
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