Longtime devotees of the Melbourne international film festival feel a mixture of nostalgia and horror when recalling the now-closed Greater Union complex on Russell Street, where before 2014 they congregated every year to sit on back-breaking seats with stains the world’s most advanced cleaning technologies couldn’t hope to remove.
The festival has survived just fine in this post-Greater Union era, annually offering an eclectic lineup of content from all corners of the globe, with screenings at multiple Melbourne venues. Here are 10 things to see and do at this year’s Melbourne international film festival.
1. The Handmaiden
Film reviewers are, of course, a bunch of parasitic know-alls who’d rather criticise other people’s art than risk making their own. Every once in a while, however, a cranky critic caterpillar emerges as a film-making butterfly.
South Korea has a doozie with Park Chan-wook. The former reviewer-cum-out-there auteur’s work (which includes 2005’s sensational Oldboy, like Shakespeare through the prism of a hard-boiled B movie) are always weird event films. On the menu this year is a racy lesbian romance about a con artist who falls for the woman she is planning to steal from.
2. The Neon Demon
Nicolas Winding Refn is another film-maker whose name is catnip on the festival circuit. His last film was the notoriously controversial albeit sumptuously shot Bangkok-set Ryan Gosling bloodbath, Only God Forgives. On the PR circuit for it, the rabble-rousing Danish writer/director described himself as “a pornographer” with all the kiddish pride of a child wearing a shiny new fake sheriff’s badge. Refn’s latest poke in the eye of decency is a slow-burning horror movie about a model (Elle Fanning) who encounters a rather … unpleasant time when she moves to Los Angeles.
3. Emo the Musical
In 2013 the writer/director Neil Triffett and the producer Lee Matthews cobbled together $10,000 to make a short high school-set musical film about bible bashers picked on by prank-pulling emos. Triffett memorably took the mickey out of two groups of people while making a serious point about bullying and tolerance. His reward was funding for a feature film expansion, with a budget pegged at $1.5m.
4. Notes on Blindness
When the theologian John Hull started losing his eyesight in the early 1980s, he began recording a series of deeply personal cassette tapes that form the foundation of a remarkable documentary from co-directors James Spinney and Peter Middleton. The film-makers recruited actors to provide the voices of Hull and his wife. This technique creates an oddly compelling blend – it’s not quite re-enactment, given the presence of straight-from-the-horse’s-mouth audio, and not quite documentary, given the presence of actors. A highly original and utterly sublime work, Notes on Blindness is a soul-stirring portrait of a man who viewed disability as an opportunity to become a better and more complete person.
5. Paris 05:59
The French directors Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau helm a touching Paris-set romantic drama about love at first sight. But before you say “sounds like a Hallmark greeting card”, bear this rather racy caveat in mind: 05:59 begins with an explicit 18-minute gay orgy sequence. Thus it is assured instant water-cooler classic status.
6. Innocence
The prolific Australian auteur Paul Cox passed away last month. In his honour, the Melbourne international film festival is screening Cox’s 2000 drama Innocence, with a panel discussion afterwards featuring two of its stars: national treasures Julia Blake and Terry Norris, who play a married couple in the film and are married in real life. Innocence begins with a Before Sunset-esque premise – two lovers meet up years down the track – and morphs into a story of late-age infidelity.
7. A New Leaf
The ultra deadpan screwball genius of the writer/director Elaine May’s 1971 debut, starring herself and Walter Matthau, has been criminally overlooked over the years. Matthau plays a broke middle-aged playboy with a plan to marry and murder a wealthy heiress in a deliciously dark and dry but, sadly, studio-tampered with classic (the original version was rumoured to be three hours long). The film is playing in the Gaining Ground program of the Melbourne international film festival, which spotlights the art of female directors working in New York in the 70s and 80s.
8. The Family, and Joe Cinque’s Consolation
I’m grouping these two titles together given they share an unusual commonality: both are Australian crime films exploring subjects injected with drugs and the people who wielded the needles. In 1997 a law student, Anu Singh, killed her boyfriend, Joe Cinque, by spiking his coffee with Rohypnol then injecting him with a massive dose of heroin; the author Helen Garner immortalised the story in her true-crime book Joe Cinque’s Consolation. Singh has already spoken out against first-time feature film-maker Sotiris Dounoukos’s incoming adaptation. The Family, directed by Rosie Jones, documents Australia’s most notorious cult. It was created by the yoga teacher Anne Hamilton-Byrne, regarded by her followers as a reincarnation of Jesus Christ. Hamilton-Byrne’s sect was raided in 1987 after a Victorian detective discovered 13-year-olds were being injected with LSD.
9. Weiner
Is there a better political campaign movie than Weiner? Is anything else even on the podium? Co-directors Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg came on board to document the 2013 mayoral race of disgraced New York congressman Anthony Weiner, determined to recover his career after a sexting scandal. What they got was a slow-moving train crash; what they made is a jaw-dropping stranger-than-fiction yarn with access so extensive you’ll wonder how they were allowed to keep filming.
10. Personal Shopper
The stars of Twilight seem to advocate the theory that actors ought to sell out early rather than later, then bask in the glow of a career renaissance (otherwise known as “the Matthew McConaughey”). Kristen Stewart continues to turn heads in Personal Shopper, a ghost movie from the French director Olivier Assayas. Meanwhile, Robert Pattinson stands his ground in the highbrow – and at times infuriatingly pretentious – drama The Childhood of a Leader.
- The Melbourne international film festival runs from 28 July to 14 August at venues around Melbourne
