Hokimoto Sora’s debut Haruneko is a quirky, somewhat surreal oddity.

In the Bright Future strand, I happened upon the Japanese production Haruneko, described in the catalogue thus: ‘makes a valiant play for the accolade “weirdest film of the year”…’. That description being too much to resist, I headed out in the cold to take a look. In many ways, the film did not disappoint. It is set in a café run by a character known only as The Manager, with his elderly helper (a woman who knits) and a young man called Haru. People who wish to die – whether young or old, healthy or ill – come to the café and are then driven to a place deep in the woods, where the point of no return is on the other side of a tunnel. Once there, they can never change their mind about dying, and what they will find is that they will slowly disappear and be transformed into sound waves. Through the lens of a magic lantern show, aspects of their past lives are flashed onto a makeshift screen, with the show always culminating in a live musical number that features a children’s choir and a raucous rock band wearing white cat masks. Honest!

These plot conceits are justified by the overarching ‘point’ of the film that, in the end, ‘all that is left for us is to sing and dance.’ This may be so, but it is a bewildering and not wholly satisfactory cinematic ‘song and dance’.

The terrible beauty of films that incorporate tropes of the fantastic, the uncanny, the speculative and the carnivalesque is that, while we can applaud the director’s bravura and commitment to such narrative strategies, these strategies need to appear seamless, unself-conscious and wholly necessary, rather than artfully pretentious. Luis Buñuel is one of a handful who could accomplish this effortlessly. Director Hokimoto Sora seems laboured and less sure-handed in dealing with these strategies in his film. A tightrope walk of visual and textual precision in balancing these particular tropes – in contradistinction to losing balance to preciousness – is of fundamental concern to the would-be storyteller, and at times Sora seems to lose this balance. Even ‘difficult’ non-mainstream texts need a discernible and perceivable overall inner logic and clarity of vision – however diffuse this may be with regard to the storyline. That uncomfortable feeling of cringe-worthy pretentiousness did rear its head in me from time to time, especially in the musical sequences where the aesthetic seemed a little prosthetic.

But having vented that criticism, I applaud the vision and courage of Sora for approaching his story in this way – we certainly could do with more of that in young filmmakers – and would, nonetheless, recommend seeing for yourself this quirky, somewhat surreal oddity.

James B. Evans

Sanal Kumar Sasidharan’s Sexy Durga is not sexy and more of a drag(a) than a durga.

Another World Premiere at IFFR was the Indian film Sexy Durga: not sexy and more of a drag(a) than a durga. Director Sanal Kumar Sasidharan’s film is described as an investigation into ‘how obsessiveness and worship can quickly degenerate in a patriarchal society into a mentality of oppression and abuse of power’. Well, yes… sort of… but this rambling text is far too open-ended and ill-disciplined to address those issues in any buttangential ways. This is Sasidharan’s fourth feature length film, and unlike his previous one, Ozhivudivasathe Kali (An Off-Day Game, 2015), which was claimed to have been made without a script, Sexy Durga is claimed to have been made without a pre-set narrative. Sorry to say that this is very evident in various drawn-out, repetitive and rambling sequences and storylines. The risk of improvisation and ‘chance’ in a film can be rewarding if all concerned are up to the challenge, but it would seem not to be the case here. Not all of the actors are persuasive enough to pull this off, and a tighter grip of the director’s hands on set and in the editing suite would have paid better dividends.

The lack of a set narrative notwithstanding, the story is about a young woman, Durga, who is on the run with her lover, Kabeer. They meet up at the side of a road and take off into the night, trying desperately to get to a train station in time to board and begin their amorous journey to a place far away from their point of origin. Along the way, they get picked up by a group of seedy fellows who become increasingly intimidating, while also seeming to be strangely protective of the couple. Sub-plots in this liminal road movie involve the couple trying to escape the group or the group expelling them from their vehicle, but somehow they always get back together to continue the journey in its cramped space.

Set against this trip is recurring footage of Hindu festivities in honour of Kali, the ’embodiment of the rage of the mother Goddess, Durga’, a four-armed deity who carries a severed head as well as her deadly weapons. During the festival, men dance ecstatically, walk across hot coals, and insert sharpened metal skewers into their faces or insert meat hooks into their backs and thighs to be hoisted up a la Richard Harris in the infamous scenes in Elliot Silverstein’s A Man Called Horse (1970). The juxtaposition of the males in the car and the males at the festival are meant to somehow conflate into a parable(?), a morality lesson (?), a polemic (?) about masculinity or, as quoted, ‘a degeneration in patriarchal society into a mentality of oppression and abuse of power’. Ok, I get it. But it is not persuasive nor clear, and, to paraphrase, the film itself is more about a degeneration in directorial society into a mentality of obfuscation and indulgence of power. To lose the plot is one thing, but to lack one, is quite another.

James B. Evans

Rey is to be admired for the vision, commitment and sheer determination of the filmmaker.

Perhaps the sheer eclecticism of the producers behind Rey – from Chile, France, Netherlands, Germany and Qatar – somehow echos the sheer eclecticism of the film itself. This wildly ambitious, experimental piece, which had its World Premiere at IFFR as part of the Hivos Tiger Competition, transcends many of the criticisms made of the previous films while at the same time ironically embracing many of those same critiques. It’s visionary, brave, memorable, but it also occasionally slips off of that aesthetic and intellectual tightrope of pretension/non-pretension, with little chance of this particular dialectic finding (or even seeking) resolution.

The PR claims that the director, Niles Atallah, shot segments of the film as early as 2011 and ‘buried the 35mm, 16mm, and 8mm film in his back garden’ for later inclusion in Rey as narrative devices to illustrate ‘deteriorating memories’, wild visions of the protagonist’s developing madness, and to raise ‘problems of history and memory’ by including these degraded visual and aural images into the final film. Atallah also developed his story with plotting devices such as puppets, masks and stop-motion animation, in addition to the scratched and disfigured celluloid exhumations. These devices and more are brought to bear on a story about a real-life but largely forgotten19th-century French lawyer and adventurer named Orélie-Antoine de Tounens, who travelled to Patagonia bearing a written constitution – composed by himself – and declared himself King. He travelled a difficult journey through untrammeled wilderness before reaching his destination and meeting with the local Mapuche tribes, who he undertook to rule over but also protect. He later minted coins, designed a flag and appointed ministers to his ‘kingdom’, which was not endorsed by French or Chilean authorities. Considered to be mad, he pressed on with his plans for the rest of his life, and after legal proceedings and deportation, finally died back in France.

The film recounts the story using experimental cinematic methods that culminate in a theatrical experience where Norman McLaren meets Terry Gilliam meets Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God, mixed with Fitzcarraldo. And even this description of some of the DNA that can be discerned in Atallah’s film doesn’t quite do it justice. Rey is a singular work and is to be admired for the vision, commitment and sheer determination of the filmmaker. The film is successful in many ways, but does occasionally slip into self-conscious affectation and slightly pretentious artifice. In the days of Midnight Movies – aided and abetted by certain psychotropic ‘refreshments’ – where the likes of El Topo, 2001: a Space Odyssey and Eraserhead triumphed, I think Rey would have found a theatrical home.

James B. Evans