And so, after 3 blissful weeks in London (and one spectacular weekend on Planet Bestival), it's back to Brazil for another year. This time, however, I've already got some work lined up, thankfully. I'm currently doing translation work for the Sao Paulo Film Festival at the end of October, translating all the synopses and directors' biographies for the festival programme among other things. It's not the most glamourous job but it does mean that I'm contact with the festival organisers; if all goes to plan, I'll also get some work during the festival itself, on site. Here's hoping. The other big news is that I'm moving out of my current home (living with a family friend) and getting my own place nearer the centre of Sao Paulo. It may be a tiny studio apartment, but having somewhere you can call your own is truly incomparable to staying in someone else's house, no matter how nice they (or the house) is. I'm looking forward to the experiences this new environment will bring, whatever they may be.
My 3 weeks in London were mostly filled with nostalgic catch-ups, meeting people I hadn't heard from in a year, if not more. But between all that, I did also manage to watch one film, Lars Von Trier's 'Antichrist'. To call it grossly controversial is an understatement.
The story is a simple one: an unnamed couple, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe, mourn the death of their child who fell out of a window whilst his parents were having sex. Feeling the burden of guilt upon their shoulders, Dafoe, a therapist, decides to take his wife to their cabin in the woods to deal with the grief, their so called "Eden". Through a series of exercises, Dafoe tries to remedy his wife's constant anxiety attacks, but he soon learns that his wife may not have been all that she seemed. Cue all the explicit violence that you will doubtless have heard of by now.
If reducing the film to such a dismissive synopsis seems unfair, I assure you it's only because it's exactly how the film seems to treat the subject matter. Von Trier has always been for his themes of mysogyny, his emotional manipulation of the audience, his struggle to push the boundaries of tasteful (and tastless) cinema, and I do applaud him for that. Yet 'Antichrist' just seems like a step in the wrong direction. For all the theological and mythological sybolism that the film offers, 'Antichrist' is not that far from the gorefests of 'Saw' and 'Hostel'. Von Trier may start off with a true desire to explore the darker sides of the human condition, but he soon gives in to the shock factor that lacks any substance. The infamous shot of Gainsbourg performing a clitorectomy is so graphic that it completely removes one from the dramatic moment; up until then, you're involved with Gainsbourg's unstable character, torn between sympathy for her grief but disgust at what she's done to her husband. The tension mounts as you see her grab the scissors and you're on the edge of your seat. And then comes the close-up and all that suspense vanishes instantly.
I won't lie and say that the film is terrible, some of the cinematography is truly stunning and the first half of the film is compelling. But it certainly doesn't merit the accolades it's apparently receiving, especially when so many of Von Trier's other films offer so much more. If this film is being deemed art because it puts aside narrative conventions in order to make the audience respond in an emotional level, then I would say that even those works of art which purport to do the same thing have some meaning behind it; as 'Antichrist' wears all its meaning on its sleeves, it's hard to see anything behind showing us a bleeding vagina. On a last note, I can't help but find it horrendously ironic that the director who fervently espoused purely aesthetic cinematic devices in his Dogme 95 manifesto opens his film with the most over-the-top montage sequence I've seen in a long time. For all its beauty, I couldn't help but think of this scene of a student film from Family Guy.
This week I saw an altogether different film, the sublimely uplifting "Up" (excuse the pun), Pixar's new film. Pixar have been producing masterpiece after masterpiece in recent years; last year's 'Wall-E' seemed to be their piece de resistance, capturing astoundly beautiful images and some truly magical scenes. What surprised me most about the film is how adult it is, particularly the opening 20 minutes; a wordless introduction to Wall-E and his world, the film dares to challenge its younger audience's attention span whilst evidently intent on mesmerising the older people in the cinema. When I went to see the film, there wasn't a single child there. Pixar had topped it with 'Wall-E' and there was no way something could be better. Or so I thought...
'Up' is the story of 78-year old Carl Frederiksen, all alone in the world after his wife's recent passing away. All his life, he'd promised to take his wife to South America to see the great waterfalls there but sadly she never made it. Intent on fulfilling that dream, Carl ties hundreds of balloons to his house and lifts off into the skies, beginning his slow journey southwards. What he didn't count on was for any company on the trip, especially not little cubscout Russell, only after his last badge to fill his sash. And so, amid adventures with talking dogs, childhood heroes, and colourful birds, Carl learns the true meaning of paradise.
As ever, Pixar delivers another terrificly fun and touching tale. In essence, this is a buddy movie with two unlikely lead characters, both of whom are simply excellent. Behind his gruff exterior, Carl is a romantic at heart, trying to desperately to live the dreams he and is wife had; Russell, meanwhile, is a curious little trooper whose befriending of Dug the talking dog and Kevin, a large, multi-coloured dodo lookalike, only seems to get in the way of Carl and his watefalls. The film does become more focused on action-adventure towards the end, with Carl and Russell trying to escape from the villainous Charles Muntz, making for some spectacular chase scenes in, on, and under a huge blimp in the sky. But the film's most outstanding sequence is not within its action-packed denouement, but rather at the very beginning of the film, a montage of the lives of Carl and his wife Ellie, charting their first meeting as 6-year old aviators all the way to Ellie's death, beautifully scored by Michael Giacchino. Its tone is so melancholic and its theme so adult, something never before seen in a Pixar or Disney film.
Perhaps it's not so surprising nowadays to see relatively dark subject matter be included in kids' animated film. After all, Japan has always treated animation as just another form of storytelling with no specific audience demographic; it's only in the West that the cartoon has been designated as something predominantly for children. I'm sure some parents will decry the notions of death and loss (which appear more than once in the film, albeit subtlely) being presented to their kids. Then again, I doubt if many parents could explain the concept of death in such a touching and meaningful manner.
