When Maths rulz...UPSTREAM COLOR @ Panorama, Berlinale 2013

UPSTREAM COLOR in Berlinale 2013' Panorama

 

A man and a woman.

Connected in more than one way.

Connected to a timeless being.

A man and a woman struggling to outline their identities.

A man and a woman collecting the pieces of their life as a scattered puzzle.

 Kris, a sort of art merchant, has just made radical changes in her life when she is getting drugged by a gang of dilletant chemists. Guys that enjoy playing with plants, animals and people. Guys who enjoy playing God.

They have for instance found narcoleptical elixirs and they prelevate larvae in order to insert in the bodies of their victims...

Kris will lose feet in a story too big for her.

A long the way (during the sempiternal suburb train travels) she finds soothing in Jeff, a man consumed by a major force. They will become each other’s shelter...

The Director-Mathematician Shane Carruth is famous in the very restreint circle of art film lovers for his debut picture: “Primer”(2004). Possibly one of the few tiny masterpieces of the past decennie, telling about time travel and the related paradoxes.

“Upstream Color” is yet again the total baby of Carruth, as he has taken care of its subject, writing, production and directing, DOP and camera, also playing the male lead.

It is an obscure and even cryptical film, intertwining science fiction, thriller and romantic drama with this couple isolated from the world by a condition that only they can understand...

It is a film all played “in the spectators’head”, just as his first film was. A very demanding moment for a tired festival goer...

 

...But an exciting company and a good previous rest could help in letting ourselves be swapt by this groovy fable...

... about a couple connected not only by deep feelings, but also by something more, much more....

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Written, Directed & Produced by Shane Carruth

Produced by Casey Gooden, Ben LeClair

Co-Produced by Meredith Burke, Toby Halbrooks

Executive Producers Scott Douglass, Brent Goodman

Edited by David Lowery, Shane Carruth

Production Designer Thomas Walker

Director of Photography Shane Carruth

Camera Operators Shane Carruth, Casey Gooden, Hunter Holder, Bongani Mlambo, Jeff

Walker

Camera Assistant Peter Koutsogeorgas

Assistant Editors Justin Scheidt, Cameron Bruce Nelson

Post Production Assistant Lara Cristensen

Craft Services Kathy Carruth, Karen Carruth

Sound Designer Johnny Marshall

Sound Editor/Mixer Pete Horner

Production Sound Chad Chance

Additional Sound Mike Gonzalez, Jon Meyer, Nolan Theis

Original Score Shane Carruth

Biological Effects Supervisor Thomas Walker

Biological Effects Bongani Mlambo, Jeff Walker

Special Effects Make-Up Heather Henry

Casting Director Kina Bale

Walden Cover Art Darrah Gooden

Colorist Toby Halbrooks

Production Assistants Arturo Lopez, Alex Wilson, Grant Cornelison, Thomas Lumpkin

Additional Make-Up Liz McCracken, Jocelyn Lopez

Weapons Master Dick Saunders, Matt Aines

CAST

Kris Amy Seimetz

Jeff Shane Carruth

Sampler Andrew Sensenig

Thief Thiago Martins

Orchid Mother Kathy Carruth

Orchid Daughter Meredith Burke

Peter Andreon Watson

SHANE CARRUTH

Shane Carruth’s first project, “Primer,” premiered at the 2004 Sundance Film

Festival, where it won the Grand Jury Prize. “Upstream Color” is his second film.

AMY SEIMETZ

Amy Seimetz is a writer, director, actor and producer. Her acting credits include

"The Off Hours," "Tiny Furniture," "Myth of the American Sleepover," "A Horrible Way

to Die," and "Alexander the Last." Her first feature as a director, “Sun Don’t Shine,”

premiered at the 2012 SXSW festival. She recently joined the cast of the

Christopher Guest HBO series “Family Tree.”

driller thriller @berlinale 2013

VIC+FLO ONT VU UN OURS

 

Berlin International Film Festival (Competition)

Cast

Pierrette Robitaille, Romane Bohringer, Marc-Andre Grondin, Marie Brassard

Director-screenwriter  Denis Cote

Among the films of the 63rd Berlinale that I found to be almost useless, stands Denis Côté’s “Vic + Flo ont vu un ours”, seen in the main Competition.

The Director himself was confessing his doubts in having succeeded this exploration of fiction.  
And the public believes the same about the story of Vic(Pierette Robitaille) and Florence(Romane Bohringer), two ex inmates with a dark past, that calls for a dark future...

Denis Côté's film is at first noticeable because it reveals unsuspected levels of cruelty in human nature.
Cote attempted here a reflection on the real dimensions of prison and freedom for human beings.

One could compare this film with Côté's documentary Bestiaire (Canada, 2012), which collected images of animals in unnatural situations inside a Quebec zoo.

The parallel and the analogies of captivity are obvious.

Like the animals of Bestiaire, the protagonist of Vic + Flo Saw A Bear is also in an unnatural situation. Flo seeks freedom, so she refuses contact with people and prefers to hide in the forest.

Côté uses a stationary camera and elegant compositions to contrast the beauty of the images with a cruel reality.

Vic is an unsecure and discrete ingenue.
Flo is an impulsive and sensual woman.
They both feel unease in their gestures, habits, clothing...
And this feeling is immediately projected onto us, specators!

The only assitance they receive is from their parol officer Guillame (Marc-André Grondin) and from the ambiguous – but resistant – feeling that connects them. 
The Director gathers weird characters around the lesbian couple:
the ghostly parole officer,
a mysterious woman seeking revenge,
and a crippled old man who can't talk, but who observes everything from his wheelchair.

In reality Vic + Flo is a true tragedy, including several lectio or lectures of the terminology.

The ironical and raher bizarre tones of the beggining are extremely appealing.
But then, suddenly, and without a valid reason, the film mutates into an emotional  thriller.

This might originate in its screenplay, quite rich in wholes and cover-ups (or rather said “forced narrative moments”).

And than, where none of these work anymore, there is the void.

A VOID that Denis Cote is dilluting to the very end.

The delirious outcome of the film works as the logical consequence of its dark and absurd situations.

Cote was truelly keen on saying something about the irreversibility of destiny...

He ended up, instead, being just irreversibly lost into rhetorics...

Among quite forgettable actors, which more is.

Except for the dark and savage fascination of "la" Bohringer...

 

 

 

 

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Production companies: La Maison de Prod, Metafilms
Cast: Pierrette Robitaille, Romane Bohringer, Marc-Andre Grondin, Marie Brassard, Georges Molnar, Olivier Aubin, Pier-Luc Funk, Guy Thauvette, Ramon Cespedes, Dany Boudereault, Johanne Haberlin, Ted Pluviose, Raoul Fortier-Mercier
Director-screenwriter: Denis Cote
Producers: Stephanie Morissette, Sylvain Corbeil
Director of photography: Ian Lagarde
Production designer: Colombe Raby
Music: Melissa Lavergne
Costume designer: Patricia McNeil
Editor: Nicolas Roy
Sales: Films Boutique
No rating, 96 minutes

 

Special Jury Award in Panorama and Teddy Award: CONCUSSION from New York

First film of director Stacie Passon-after a career as a commercial producer-  CONCUSSION is the kind of discovery you come to the Berlinale’ Panorama and hope for.

Abby (Robin Weigert) is an interior designer turned soccer mom, desperate housewife, a bourgeoise, an assimilated, disengaged, wealthy suburban lady. Abby is a lesbian, with a divorce-lawyer wife and two young kids. They are a perfect familly in the suburbs of New York.

Abby wakes up one day, after suffering a bad bump, with the feeling that the spark has gone out of her life, sexually and otherwise.

So she goes back to work, renovating a Manhattan loft.
Particularly bothered by the lack of physical affection she gets from businesslike Kate, Abby goes to a prostitute, then another, until she becomes herself an escort for female clients only.
Thus, from pied-à-terre to maison de plaisir.

So far from being hit by amnesia, she is rather hit by an epiphany.

The clients she entertains are gay, some, or some merely curious.

What follows is sometimes poignant (the overweight virgin prompted by a women's studies course to rent a date), sometimes psychologically intriguing (an older woman who nearly talks herself out of doing what she has paid for), and sometimes exciting.

But one of the quietly revolutionary things about Concussion is that it takes Abby's sexuality and her domestic situation, and proceeds from there on.

The movie's true subject is a problem (the loss of passion) that can happen in any relationship.
And Passon addresses it in a series of smart, funny and surprising ways. A thorough reflexion on marriage, fidelity, sexuality and the choices we make in life…

The Director's attitude towards this glossy character remains  unclear, though.
So I cannot stop asking myself some questions ...
Are her illicit experiences meant to redeem her in some way?
Are they anything more than a reminder of her wild days?

Some have compared the film to a sort of Belle de jour in a lesbian sauce.
In reality I’d say it is a painfull, interesting but discontinous portrait (the second half and the scarce male characters leave me a bit hungry) of the life of a couple.

By the film's end, the character - whose married life boils down to making choices between khaki, parchment and beige... - seems unchanged.

And Concussion can't decide if that's a good thing or bad.

 

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Production companies: Concussion LLC, Razorwire Films, Cliff Chenfeld Productions, The Group Films
Cast: Robin Weigert, Maggie Siff, Johnathan Tchaikovsky, Julie Fain Lawrence, Emily Kinney, Laila Robins
Director-Screenwriter: Stacie Passon
Producer: Rose Troche
Executive producers: Cliff Chenfeld, Anthony Cupo
Director of photography: David Kruta
Production designer: Lisa Myers
Costume designer: Jennifer K. Bentley
Editor: Anthony Cupo
No rating, 95 minutes 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pain is Good: MES SEANCES DE LUTTE by Jacques Doillon

 

A black screen and a piece of Debussy :

This is how "Mes Seances De Lutte" by Jacques Doillon starts.

It is like a presentiment.

Or even better, a different manner of advising us that this story is not just about love and violence between two adults.  

 

The childhood.

The slow, inexorable, unavoidable building of a fortress around itself, as the years pass by, as the world amplifies, as some people desappear for letting some new ones fill in their place, and some other people just deasappear and leave a huge void.

A void that will somehow be filled.

 

 

And it does not matter having becomed adults.

Because you try to fill it up by instinct, like a child.

But contrary to a child, you are not innocent anymore. You have already learnt to be merciless, even evil if necessary.

It is important to defend yourself. It is important not to suffer again.

You don’t want to remember, but something obliges you to.

It is a subtle pain that could become every day even more unbearable.

Objects are impregnated with memories and they observe you from their soulless state, emphasizing the outline of your forgiveness.

That piano, for instance.

The piano that a father always wanted to see you playing at and that you always saw as an ennemy…

There is that father that dies… a certain presence that vanishes and whos disappearance ignites feelings of guilt and desillusion that had remained scelled, buried under denial.

The force that the director convies to that piano is extraordinary. But it is still a pretext to speak about people, about us.

A woman and a man that meet again after having attentively avoided eachother.

 The woman who, having lost her father, goes looking for that man on a hill where he is taking care of a friend.

And just by chance, the first time we see this man in the film, he is building a wall.

If her anaesthesia is brutally interrupted by Death, the man’s lingering state will suddenly be interrupted by the vision of a woman that suddenly returns to his life.

 "Why are you here? Why are you back?" he asks.

And it is the beginning of a storm.

A daily encounter.

The battles, so do they decide to call them.

Each of them with its own fortress around, they decide to battle even harder at each encounter until they can break through their respective walls.

For ultimateley finding beyond those bareers “just” two people that need to be loved and who are affraid to do it because they believe they do not know how to do it, they don’t deserve it, or that they are irremediably wrong.

 Every day there is a battle.

Doillon has shot this low budget film during two summer months, apparently without a screenplay, but in reality extremely precise.  Shaped on an exact measure.

One dialogue too much, one exceeding or lesser gesture, and the ridiculous would enter by the main door, compromising everything.

But this is not happening.

Characters and spectators begin to believe it, to enter the games and demands of this film. And the director seems happy to make visible some uncertainty.

Because improvisation is the mean and the message of this film.

How to use it, how to deny it, how to bring it under the light of truth and then violently throw it into fiction.

This is what Doillon seems to question, with this empiric experiment, in a somehow Seventies’ fashion.

A film about the contradiction of an absolutely cerebral dialogue and a totally physical action, primordial and immediate.

 A film that could be therapeutical, or the total opposite.

So days pass, and violence and libido start to merge.
Until they become one same thing.

Everyday, they try to fill up each other’s void…
And more time passes, and less they care about hurting each other.
On the contrary, pain is even welcomed.

 Every battle is a sort of couple exorcism, where one is the exorcist of the other.

Not alone anymore, they plounge in a gloomy, confused waiting.

 Finally together.

 And we should prepare to wait...

 

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