Some film festival words of wisdom

Yesterday I went to my second film festival of the summer - Raindance. Unfortunately as am returning to Oxford tomorrow, yesterday was the only day I was able to spend at the festival, but I made the most of it - catching three films, all of which are up for various awards - best international film, and best documentary. With amazing luck for the hit-and-miss nature of indie film, I completely adored all three films, and felt as though the entire day gave me a lot to think about.

The first, Youth H2: Come As You Are, gave me a bit of shock. Having read the three-sentence blurb about it, which described it as a film about a guy who works in a video store who has trouble getting with the girl he fancies because of the way he’s been brought up… This did NOT explain the film in any way. The first shot was of the character Haruo watching porn on his iPhone, and beginning to masturbate, only to blow his load within 4 seconds, followed by the title, ‘Come As You Are’ appearing on the screen, just to get you into the spirit of the film. It was a half-comedic, half-tragic film about premature ejaculation, which the director Kota Yoshida himself has suffered from. This stops him from feeling able to pursue the girl as he would like, and lands him in a troublesome situation with his housemate, when he asks her to ‘help him out’ with his ‘problem’. The film was unbelievably frank, particularly when on such a touchy subject for both the director and the lead actor (who has also suffered from PE), with incredible acting (how on earth does one manage to make a sum total of about 30 orgasms or so during the film look unique, and yet still realistic?) and a brutal character assassination leaving no happy ending for a character that doesn’t deserve it. I hate how Hollywood characters often ‘redeem’ themselves and therefore can still land the girl. There are some things you can’t redeem. This character was a hopeless, desperate poor excuse of a man, who deserved humiliation in return for his arrogance. And as this humiliation was done so subtly, it was perfect. Well done to the girl for not succumbing. Girls should learn from this.

One thing that was slightly frustrating about the film was that in both sex scenes, the girl orgasmed before he did. I found this annoying as it further perpetrates the myth that all girls orgasm from sex - and in this situation where the man seems particularly sexually inexperienced, it seems all the more unlikely. However, the director touched on this afterwards - although I still don’t think both girls should have orgasmed, he was trying to highlight the difference in perception of the concept of ‘premature’ - how it is socially acceptable for a girl to finish early (and then apparently stop!), and yet it means ultimate humiliation for a man, which was indeed interesting.

Next for a documentary. Heaven + Earth + Joe Davis was perhaps not the most well-made documentary (the director, Peter Sasowsky, admitted afterwards that he hadn’t really planned out the film, and was unsure what angle to take), but the subject matter was just so compelling that I came out beaming anyway. Joe Davis is an artist, using biology and physics to not only create incredible, thought-provoking art, but also to further scientific research. He sounds completely bonkers half of the time (I think quite a few of the clips showed him high), with his blabbering fantastical storytelling, and his off-the-wall ideas (like powering a plane on the electrical contractions of frog’s legs), but everything he said was based on pure, concrete science. Most amazingly, he created a mechanism of inserting ‘silent DNA’ into a gene, which would be passed from generation to generation, harmlessly, but also would not get weeded out due to his genius method. As a result, he put some Greek poetry on to this piece of silent DNA - his way of making science poetic. He complained that in studying DNA we wanted to find genes for love, for compassion, for hope - but these things we would never find. He felt that this was a way of bringing this full circle. Beautiful!

I could list all the other amazing, inspiring ideas that he has had, but that would probably do an injustice to his science (which goes far beyond anything I can understand), and to the sheer scope of his ideas - I would be mentioning a mere fragment - barely scratching the surface of his genius. The film provided a beautiful portrait of the man - rather than examining his ideas. However there were some things that really struck me in the film:

- First, the fact that he sent vaginal contractions into space to communicate with aliens. Yes, again sounds bizarre, but it was a backlash to the fact that when NASA sent information about humans into space, they sent a full anatomical diagram of a man, but not of a woman - completely blanking out her reproductive organs, neutering her to the status of a child’s doll. [As he indeed says, when people ask him what place vaginal contractions have in space, he replies ‘What place does Barbie have?’] This disgusted him, not only because of the hypocritical sexist nature of it - but the fact that we were now transmitting our own prejudices into space. That saddened me, as it did him.

- The second thing that affected me was how he, more than anyone I have ever seen before, is so driven by his own passion and his own wants, that he does not care where the next paycheck is coming from, he has given up any kind of normal life for his own ideas. Although the filmmaker himself had to spend 10 years filming as he needed to save up money to fund it, and to stay alive himself, Joe Davis does not think like this. Joe Davis will do anything he sets his mind to, and that is one of the most inspiring things I have ever seen.

Finally I settled down for what could be seen much more as a conventional film, sort of Before Sunrise meets BDSM porn. After Fall, Winter looked at a man in Paris, falling in love with a dominatrix, while he himself was engaging in BDSM activity on the side. The touching side story also saw the dominatrix character in her other job, as a hospice worker, looking after dying patients, including a 13-year-old leukemia patient. This worked not only as a fantastic narrative device, but as a beautiful story in itself. I absolutely loved most of the film - with a stunning performance from the lead actress, Lizzie Brocheré (Eric Schaeffer, the director, writer and star, was not very strong on his emotional scenes, but coped well elsewhere), who captured the emotionally crippled, slightly mental character perfectly, whilst still being pretty much the hottest actress I’ve ever seen. My only problem with the film was the ending. Without wanting to spoil the horrific, brutal ending, I felt that it ultimately destroyed the character that she had portrayed so well throughout the film, as it was too out of character, and didn’t chime well with her position as a hospice worker, or as the daughter of an Alzheimer’s patient. You’ll have to see it for yourself to make your own judgement - Eric Schaeffer was very defensive about the ending. At the beginning of the film her character offered her own piece of wisdom - Pain will never lie to you. Neither will death.

Pretty morbid, but there we have it. Three beautiful (in their own unique way) films, with some words of wisdom ranging from death and pain, to art and beauty, to prejudice (be it sexism or premature ejaculation) - and all in one evening. This is why I love indie film.