I was running a bit late for Note By Note: The Making of Steinway L1037, and actually missed the first five minutes; but I'm glad I didn't give it a miss, and not just because I had already paid for a ticket. The basic conceit was that the documentary would follow the construction of a concert grand piano, from timber to timbre, so to speak. Along the way, they interviewed not just the many expert craftsmen who hand-craft the Steinway pianos, but also those who play them - people coming to the factory to find a suitable instrument for a concert, but also a family who is buying one for their son, so that the grandfather can still enjoy it. There was lots of discussion about pianos can differ from one another, and why different people might choose different pianos. There were interviews with classical and jazz musicians (including Harry Connick Jnr) about how the piano differs from other instruments, different artists' playing styles, and why they started on the piano - one of them credited a Tom & Jerry cartoon, where the mouse is trapped inside the piano and being hit by the hammers.
They also talked a bit about how much the piano has fallen from the time when every home would have one, and how hard it is to find good craftsmen and keep the tradition going; they had workers from all over the world in the shop. I'd known that the inside of the piano was complicated, since I know how much of a jump in expression that it allowed for composers; I just hadn't realised quite how complicated.
It was a nice change to see a documentary that was just slightly melancholy, instead of one that made me angry or horrified.
* * *
And then I dashed out to the fruit & vege market outside Te Papa to pick up some apples, and then got back in plenty of time to take my seat for Secret Sunshine. Unfortunately, I then realised that I didn't have the tickets that I had picked up for Jackie with me, and I needed them for my next film; since Soundings theatre doesn't have any phone reception, I had to make my way past a bunch of people, and go out and call C (who was luckily still at home); C completely saved my bacon, and agreed to drop off the tickets in town. I then had to go back in and get past my long-suffering seat-mates again, in the dark.
The movie itself was about... well, the existence of evil in a world with a good God, and how people deal with grief. A woman and son move to her husband's hometown after he dies in a car accident; the mechanic who picks them up from their broken-down car becomes infatuated with her, and does his oafish best to win her heart. Soon everyone in town knows her life story, including the fact that she's ostensibly planning to buy some land as an investment; which is why someone thinks that she's got enough money to make it worth kidnapping her son, which goes horribly wrong.
There's a bunch of Christianity in this film, and it's kinda weird to think how alien the iconography and setting would be to a Korean mindset - pews are kinda distinctive pieces of furniture. (There's one bit where her friends are sitting around talking, and one says that she'll become Christian later, so she won't have to carry out the expensive funerary rights for her parents, and her children won't have to do it for her.) And there's the problem of trying to forgive someone, and then finding out that they've become Christian, and believe that they've already been absolved of the crime that you were trying to forgive them for - how could God do this to her, she asks, forgive this man before she was ready to? So she decides to try and get even.
I have mixed feelings about this film. It's a hard question that they're trying to address, and I don't think I agree with the answer that they come up with; but that doesn't make it a bad film. And there are parts that are quite funny. I won't be watching it again, however.
* * *
Off to the Embassy I trotted, backtracking once I got the text that C had left the tickets at the Soundings theatre, and met up with Jenni, Jackie et al. for Mongol, an epic about the early life of Genghis Khan. It was... well, an Asian historical epic, with revenge, betrayal, honour, sweeping landscapes and big, bloody fight scenes. It was also something of a love story, which was a bit of a surprise.
On the whole, while there were a few slow sequences, I really liked it, and I suspect that I'll go to the next installment.
* * *
My next film had me at the Paramount, for Let The Right One In, a Swedish young vampire flick. I managed to get C an icecream, despite technical difficulties on the other side of the counter; and I'd just like to note that lemongrass and ginger is actually quite nice as an icecream.
The basic story - a 12 year-old boy is being bullied at school, and a young girl who has been 12 for a long time moves into the flat next door with a man who is probably not her father. There's hints that the boy might be troubled (folder full of murder stories, plays with a knife), but we see enough to know that he's basically a good kid. The girl tells him, when they first meet, that they can't be friends; as you might have guessed, this isn't true.
This film doesn't suffer too badly from Our Vampires Are Different, which is actually quite neat. And they do a good job at raising empathy for the girl, while not diluting what she is. All in all, a pretty good vampire film.
* * *
And then I went to Timecrimes, a time-travel movie. This was... all right, but not brilliant. I mean, they'd put a lot of thought into making things consistent, but the motivation of the main character to do some of the things he did was opaque - in particular, his quick and complete acceptance that paradoxes could not be allowed to happen, and the lengths he was prepared to go to in order to prevent them.
I mean, my take would be -- if paradoxes ended the universe, surely someone else in the universe would have invented time travel and ended it before now?
I don't want to spoil the movie for people who might see it, but I have to agree with a person I chatted with afterwards, who said that there's really only one tense period in the movie, near the beginning. Not as confusing as most of the time-travel movies I've seen at the festival (apart from that terrible Kiwi one), but ultimately not as satisfying either.
* * *
Then suddenly it was Monday again, and the end of C's leave. Getting up in plenty of time (though not early enough to go in with C, unfortunately), I went to the Paramount for Billy the Kid, a documentary about a guy in his early teens who is smart, but has trouble fitting in, or keeping still for that matter. Especially at the beginning of the documentary, his eyes were always darting around nervously, and he seemed wary in the halls; he seemed to have trouble judging how much to share, or how to deal with people.
This was a pretty painful movie to watch; I suspect anyone with dorkiness lurking in their adolescence would find it difficult, seeing him make some of the same mistakes, but on camera. I mean, I never wore my karate outfit to my potential girlfriend's parent's diner (or did karate at all, come to that), but I can remember when that might have seemed like a good idea. :) And I didn't have the pain of my mistakes recorded forever on film.
One of the things that was curious for me was that a large number of his cultural touchstones seemed to be from the eighties - quoting The Karate Kid or The Terminator, wanting to grow his hair long like Gene Simmons (who is the band Kiss; the effeminate aerobics guy is the other one) and talking about ACDC and other rockers from that era. I don't know whether it's that area, or because he was so close to his mother; but it seemed weird that his tastes weren't more, I dunno, contemporary. Aren't there still mainstream rockers out there?
Oh, the end credits had him singing along to "God Gave Rock & Roll To You", which I only know from Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure.
All in all, I'm glad I watched it, but I don't know if I could manage it a second time.
* * *
I then ducked out to have lunch; because I actually had a pretty big break, I decided to head to Sweet Mother's Kitchen; as I walked towards it, I bumped into Pete, who works above them, so we had lunch, and he filled me in on the latest happenings at Chez Andersen. After a nice po' boy, I went back to the Paramount for La Zona, a drama about a gated community in South America. The basic plot concerns three thieves that manage to slip in, and accidentally kill someone; two are killed as they try to escape, and the third disappears inside the area. Complicating matters are the fact that a resident accidentally shot a security guard during the confusion, and the residents are desperate to keep the special status that keeps the police (and subsequent harassment and corruption) out of the community, which they'll lose in the event of a violent death.
The roving vigilante groups and mounting paranoia is exacerbated by a police captain who is relentless in pursuing the crime, though sometimes get the impression that he's more offended by the idea of a different law for the rich, than any need for justice per se. And the son of one of the more reasonable council members ends up making contact with the remaining thief...
This was a pretty good crime drama, and it occurs to me that it would make an interesting murder mystery setting, with the intense video surveillance coupled with the inexperience in evidence collection that the security guards probably have, and the resident's intense desire to not see any problems. I don't think I'll be watching it again, though.
* * *
Then it was off to the Film Archive for three films in a row (which is why I now have an aching backside). The first was Buddha Collapsed Out Of Shame, a drama about a little girl who decides that she wants to go to school "to learn the funny stories". She has to deal with a series of obstacles - she can't find her mother to get money for a notebook (walking along the ridge to town yelling, "Mama, I'm falling! You have to come catch me, mama!"), so she takes some eggs to the market to try and sell them; I can't believe that no-one took pity on her adorableness.
Then, once she starts off to school, she is grabbed by a gang of older boys who declare that they're Taliban, and she's an American spy; they grab her notebook (because girls shouldn't go to school), and tear out pages to make paper aeroplanes to "shoot" at the Buddha that was blown up by the actual Taliban. They then dig a pit, which they tell her is her grave, and that they're going to stone her, ignoring her insistence that she doesn't want to play, "the stoning game".
The child actors in this film are really good - the gang of boys are really quite terrifying, and the smaller kids do an excellent job. The little girl, in particular, is very good indeed. But the society that they show... I dunno, I'm glad I never had to deal with that sort of thing as a kid, that's all I'll say.
* * *
Continuing my difficult film run, I next went to If We Knew, about a Swedish paediatric clinic for premature babies, and the circumstances where you stop artificially supporting the infant, and whether it is ethical to euthanize a baby that you know is going to have a miserable life of constant suffering. This sort of thing is basically why I'm really, really glad I am not, and will never be, a doctor.
There's something about the death of children, especially babies, that is really difficult to deal with. I know that I'm often nervous around infants, because it's so obvious how fragile they are - a moment's clumsiness could make a huge difference. And it was obvious that all of these doctors really cared about the children they were trying to look after.
For completely different reasons to Billy the Kid, this is another movie that I don't think I could easily watch again.
* * *
And then to round off my difficult movie experience, I had Donkey In Lahore, a documentary about an Australian puppeteer who, after a ten-day visit to Pakistan, decides to convert to Islam so he can marry a young girl he met there. As you might have guessed, he's not always the most practical of souls, and admits in the course of the film to his bride-to-be that he has Borderline Personality Disorder. As plan after plan falls through (because he doesn't have enough money to get a house in Pakistan, and can't get his idea for a Pakistani puppet TV programme off the ground, and he can't get all the documents necessary for the visa so the young woman can come to Australia to be with him), and the obvious cultural differences stay to cause tensions (he was a goth, his sister is a lesbian, her brothers don't consider a conversion in Australia to make him a "true" Muslim), it seems that this is going to be the story of a disaster. But, while not wanting to spoil the ending, it seems to be a happy one.
At the end of the film, I'm still not sure that the whole thing was a great idea - they might both have been happier if the puppeteer had laughed off the girl's suggestion that they get married. But I guess it's a testament to something that they went through with it, and everything pretty much worked out. The adaptability of people, maybe?