Rick's Reel Recommendations #8: 5 Excitements for New Zealand Film Festival

RICK'S REEL RECOMMENDATIONS | COLUMN | DRUGS

Written by Ricky Lai (he/him) | @rickylaitheokperson  | Contributing Columnist

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The festival line-up is a box of candy this year, so take your pick. Just as I was ready to merely settle for catching Tobe Hooper’s ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ (1974) on the big screen yet again, the motherload came in: Cannes competition titles (‘The Secret Agent’, ‘Sentimental Value’), re-screenings of classics (‘Angel’s Egg’, ‘Hard Boiled’), home-grown eccentricities (‘Went Up a Hill’, ‘The Weed Eaters’) and music docs for Lennon & Ono, McGlashan, Malmus… where even to begin?! While everybody’s interests disperse in different ways, I can only truly draw from my own instincts and tastes, so here are five films in the Auckland circuit that I think will be worth remembering.

1. It Was Just An Accident (dir. Jafar Panahi)

Indeed, backstory is an attractive catalyst for deciding ahead of time what’ll be championed as ‘important’ years from now. Unfortunately, in the midst of several house moves, I lost my crystal ball, and can no longer predict for you whether ‘It Was Just An Accident’, this year’s victor of the Palme d’Or at Cannes, will be recalled in the collective memory after the endless scrolls of critical discourse inevitably bubble and spit following its award sweep. (To ponder as an example: does anybody even still think about ‘Triangle of Sadness’?) I do not mean to downplay the vitality of Jafar Panahi’s circumstances themselves, nor his defiance in continuing to direct and release films illegally under the Iranian government, in between imprisonments and bypassing political censorship of authority critique. Indeed, this has become a progressively more urgent theme in his work since 2011’s ‘This Is Not a Film’, merely the first out of seven stunning films. I just mean to shave down any suspicion that, in the wake of current events, a political dissident could’ve only been awarded prestigious validation via the sympathy card. Panahi’s films, layered with fascinating weaves of conversation and teetering tensely along country borders, can be thickly atmospheric, unifying, and extremely funny. The masterstrokes of his oeuvre – stretching as far back as ‘The White Balloon’ (1995) and ‘Offside’ (2006) – show that the sword was sharpened not because of his dissidence but due to the unique command of his form. Go see this!

2. Resurrection (dir. Bi Gan)

I still haven’t seen ‘Megalopolis’ – not even the bonafide charisma of Aubrey Plaza nor the rich collapse of the Osvaldo Golijov score have tempted me yet to the poisoned feast – but precisely its diagnosis as a cumbersome, fraught, pretentious, surrealist art-house epic with deliquisicing brushstrokes tinted with the shades and tones of cinema’s past, is what I really expect from ‘Resurrection’, the latest overarm bowl from Chinese auteur Bi Gan (2015’s ‘Kaili Blues’; 2018’s ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night’). I expect a totally opaque narrative, perhaps nothing I can decode without research afterwards – not everybody’s idea of fun, and completely fair enough – but at the end of the day, I just hope for beautiful images to wash over me. I ask for nothing more. Voices from in between the cracks in my basement walls are whispering to me that this major work, at 160 minutes, draws from the German expressionists and American film noir. Okay, sure – I’m in!

3.  Misericordia (dir. Alain Guiraudie)

For this one, I can be completely sure of my endorsement – I’ve seen it already, and can’t wait to see it again. The bucolic libido of the French lends itself to a treacly slow-burn of equal parts rural pleasure, encroaching creepiness, and wicked humour. It’s an inky-black comedy about a young, pansexual man named Jérémie – who looks like a permanently unsure Kyle MacLachlan – returning to his home village to comfort the widow of his boss, and finds out very quickly that the son of this lady is extremely unhappy about his presence, for more reasons than one. Feast your eyes on ravishing wide shots of the Aveyron countryside, a nightmarish punchline that involves mushroom foraging, and the most confusingly large penis on film since Willem Dafoe in ‘Antichrist’.

4. Sound of Falling (dir. Mascha Schilinski)

Of my five recommendations, this is the film I know the least about and am therefore the most tentative towards. But I am a sucker for an epic that spans across multiple decades, like Jia Zhangke’s ‘Platform’ (2000), the Wachowskis’ ‘Cloud Atlas’ (2012), and Bertrand Bonello’s ‘The Beast’ (2023), to name a few. With that in mind, I suspect that ‘Sound of Falling’, about the same farmstead in Altmark, Germany, shared by four girls of different historical periods, aims to totally bowl its audience over by its sheer scope and ambition. I simply hope it delivers.

5. The Mastermind (dir. Kelly Reichardt)

The rural shiver and lonely pauses of Kelly Reichardt have made her one of my utmost favourite directors, but even moreso for how she nails the quiet awkwardness of everyday interaction, even when the situation calls for a more urgent response. I think about highlights like in ‘Night Moves’ (2013), where three environmental activists nervously bicker outside a warehouse about what might be the least suspicious way to buy a shit-ton of fertiliser (it’s for a bomb, y’see), or in ‘First Cow’ (2019) where the wealthy English factor is left with his jaw wide open in shock after realising the two travellers that he’s just pardoned have been trying to steal milk from his cow. These moments make me very excited for ‘The Mastermind’, which returns to Reichardt’s familiar state of Oregon for a story about an art thief played by former ‘challenger’ Josh O’Connor, plus Alana Haim, Gaby Hoffman, and John Magaro – the latter of whom stole the show in the director’s last film, ‘Showing Up’ (2022).

Tickets available at nziff.co.nz