By: Henry J. Fromage –
Day Three of the festival was one preoccupied with human psychology- to drastically different effect it turns out.
254. The Currents
This knotty, challenging drama begins with a well put-together young woman accepting some kind of professional prize in Switzerland, going to the bathroom and pushing it into the garbage there, then absconding to walk around town before nonchalantly swinging her legs over a railing and plunging into the roaring currents below. Just as quickly after, she’s walking back into her hotel in a disaster blanket dragging a bag of her wet clothes behind her, but now she’s developed a fear of water, which manifests itself in increasingly strange ways when she returns to her seemingly perfect husband and little daughter in Argentina. Director Milagros Mumenthaler and star Isabel Aimé González Sola are not here to offer easy answers or pat psychology (although a late reveal does provide more undergirding to her actions than I was expecting to get). This is a woman well past the verge of a nervous breakdown, figuring out how and whether she even wants to pick up the pieces. Two Beers.
255. 25 Cats from Qatar
You may not think a documentary about a Milwaukee cat cafe owner traveling over to Qatar to bring back 25 cats for adoption at her establishment would delve terribly deeply into human psychology, but this film will prove you wrong. While the cats are, indeed, adorable, the real story here is the network of mainly expats (86% of the nation’s population are foreign workers) who rescue street cats in dire circumstances and who our American works with to find cats she knows she can get adopted quickly, so she can do it all over again. They come from many cultural backgrounds and have their own particular reasons why they spend their own time and money in this cause, and seeing them come together to give these creatures a second chance at life is a beautiful, very human thing. Two Beers.
256. The Exorcist II: The Heretic
John Boorman’s highly anticipated and then immediately much maligned sequel to smash hit and all-time classic The Exorcist is being held up by some as some kind of misunderstood masterpiece. I’ll be watching a documentary tomorrow, Boorman and the Devil, that is at least making the case it’s more interesting than given credit for. I can cosign on that- the concept of bringing then-modern psychology (or perhaps pseudoscience) into Regan MacNeil’s continuing ordeal with the demon Pazuzu has some meat on the bone. Unfortunately Richard Burton thinks he’s been invited to the Overacting Championships and the script and editing team up for not a few laugh out loud moments, which drains just about all of the gravitas powering its predecessor. A fascinating failure, but still a failure. Five Beers.
257. The Stranger
François Ozon delivers a very restrained (for him) black and white adaptation of Albert Camus’ 1942 novel, in which a young man in colonial Algiers buries his mother, gets a girlfriend, and kills a young Algerian man in rather quick succession, displaying a seeming indifference to all of the above throughout. This kind of existentialist (or perhaps even to some degree nihilist) character and story are extraordinarily difficult to bring to film, where the camera invites identification, but Ozon and his star Benjamin Voisin do a great job breathing life into a man who could otherwise come off as more of a philosophical exercise. Two Beers.
