I love Melbourne in winter, when the air is so cold it stings your eyes and the Melbourne International Film Festival takes over the city centre.
The best thing I can do for my creative practice is to write as often as possible, so in that spirit I’ve decided to start jotting down capsule reviews for some of the things I see at MIFF this year. I’m not going to place limits on myself, so I may write about films I loved, films I hated, films I anticipated, films that surprised me… whatever piques my interest and presents something I think worth talking about. And I may not keep it up past this first entry, so we’ll see how I go.
THE WORK ★★★★½
Twice a year, New Folsom Prison allows members of the public to enter its walls to participate in a four-day group therapy session with inmates facilitated by former prisoners and counsellors. Prisoners begin the four-day intensive with a pact to leave prison rules and gang politics at the door, and the outsider participants find themselves thrust into the world’s most intense psychotherapy session, where white, black, Asian and Native American gang members down their arms and lay bare their most intimate insecurities and anxieties to one another, hoping to find some kind of remedy for the failures, betrayals and mistakes that landed them in prison.
The Work promises a “rare look inside the cinder-block walls” of a prison, but once the outsiders start divulging their own stories it slowly becomes clear that what the film actually offers is a deep dive into the darkest recesses of the human mind — and a slow realisation that the blackest of those recesses might not belong to any of the prisoners.
A genuinely bracing work of up-close filmmaking, The Work will hit you square in the chest and send a shiver down your spine — and make you think about how precariously balanced the line between functioning member of society and lifelong criminal really is.
CALL ME BY YOUR NAME ★★★★½
“Is it better to speak or die?”
This question lies at the heart and soul of Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name, a sumptuous and beautiful romance story set in the summer of 1983. Elio (Timothée Chalamet) is enjoying another quiet summer in northern Italy as any 17-year-old son of rich Americans would do: lounging by the pool, eating apricots, reading, playing piano and cavorting with the local girls. Oliver (Armie Hammer), a statuesque doctoral student hired by Elio’s father to assist him in his research, arrives to their estate and suddenly awakens in Elio a budding lust that he struggles to understand, much less act upon.
As the sunny days meander by, the two men dance around one another, slowly and tentatively giving in to the desire that dare not speak its name. Theirs is an attraction that at first confuses Elio and, given the era, poses questions of acceptance and decorum. Is it better to speak or die? Speak and risk everything, or don’t speak and condemn yourself to a life without anything worth risking.
Their lust is expressed not through sex (at least, not on screen) but through fleeting moments of tenderness spent in secret on the banks of a crystal clear river, or hidden in the forgotten rooms of the sprawling estate. Call Me By Your Name is overflowing with sensuality, and Guadagnino’s wandering frame contrasts the quiet stillness of the landscape with the raging desire lurking just beneath the surface of his two leads.
The director’s choice to shoot on a single, unchanged lens — placing the camera between the characters in intimate moments, never giving too much context — resists allowing the two men to truly give themselves to one another, and delicately balances the viewer at the explosive centre of their sexual tension. Call Me By Your Name is, if nothing else, surely one of the sexiest films to come out of Italy since the days of Fellini.