TRUE/FALSE '11: Critic's Notebook

by Vadim Rizov

You Are All Captains is a hard movie to synopsize: it's not confusing, but the component parts initially sound boringly familiar. A director—playing a jokey version of "himself"—helps refugee children in Tangiers make their movies, in a series of scenes that repeatedly blur the line between what's "real" and fake, the children's vision and his own. This isn't just meta-reflexive game-playing: You Are All Captains is a movie arguing for the importance and pleasures of a very particular strain of art-house filmmaking that also happens to be an outstanding example of it.

That tradition isn't necessarily the kind of hybridized, artful documentaries Dennis Lim wrote about recently. Despite its presence at the True/False Film Festival in Columbia, MO this year (a fest devoted solely to documentaries, which just finished its eighth annual run; this was my second time attending), director Oliver Laxe cautioned during an introduction that everything here is, in fact, false. Laxe's film was mentioned in Lim's piece, as was Abbas Kiarostami, whose frequently exposes its own artifice. Taste of Cherry ends by exposing the set, and all of Close-Up plays with overtly blurring the line between reenactment, staged reality and actual trial footage.

Laxe toys around with these elements, but his affinity with Kiarostami has less to do with the structural ambiguities than the way he films children: as curious and bright but often stubborn or recalcitrant. Early on, workshop director "Laxe" tries to lecture them about the way images are transmitted through lenses. The discussion goes over their heads, and Laxe sets about staging their lives without telling them what his broader goal is. Later on, the kids complain that what Laxe is shooting "isn't even a movie." It's just a collection of scenes, "without any story." "You cannot make a movie like that," one scores. It's a funny scene, but also a sly way of calling out real critics who actually complain about this children (like the trade reporters from Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, who panned this film by basically saying they were bored).

After Laxe leaves, the children go to the country to film what they'd like to see themselves: nature, with a particular emphasis on swaying fields in the wind and olive trees. This is firm formalism in the vein of Kiarostami's long, serene nature shots and penchant for watching cars drive over landscapes for extended periods of time, and an interest in rural poetry similar to the soothing jungle landscapes of Apichatpong Weerasethakul. With "Laxe" as director's negativity omitted—he has the children stage a chicken-stealing scene—the troubled refugee kids find moments of grace.

It sounds awfully heavy-handed—it's hard to describe without sounding overwrought—but it's a really soothing experience, for audience as well as the children, a riff on like-minded filmmakers' more ambient moments. The first half (playful without being grating) sets up an argument for what the film becomes: a series of mostly plotless incidents, a slightly different way of looking at narrative and the natural world that ends up surprisingly uplifting without overtly accomplishing anything. Laxe has referred to his presence in the film as portraying a "neocolonial" director, and the question of how a European director can depict or mediate the depiction of Moroccan children figures into the mix. The politics, though, exist at a sublimated level, the film eventually escaping those kinds of concerns to momentarily release you from those fears.

At the Edge of Russia shares unintentional overlap with Alexei Popogrebsky's How I Ended This Summer. The latter is a narrative film that pits an older, inexplicably rude walking example of Russian macho pathologies against his younger, more timid assistant at a remote government weather data-collection station in the Arctic Ocean. It's compelling but also a little overheated: it doesn't seem to realize that everything happenings is bordering on absurdity. At the Edge of Russia ups the ante by actually sending a young, relatively wispy recruit into a whole house full of these older macho types deep in the Siberian snow. The difference here is perspective: Popogrebsky is Russian and takes himself almost a little too seriously, but director Michal Marczak is Polish, so he thinks all this is very funny.

Presented without overt comment, At the Edge of Russia is 72 droll minutes of a sheep thrown in with some old wolves. The snowy fort is one of 12 left over from Soviet times to guard the "borders" of Siberia, which no sane person would ever go, let alone attempt to invade from (the snow's just too much). Here, in a womanless environment—something they spend a lot of time lamenting but seem to enjoy—grizzled men have savage arguments about the proper way to wrap one's foot in cloth against the cold, play mournful songs about their mother on acoustic guitar, and have vodka-fueled emotional freak-outs.

Recruit Alexei looks on warily—"you have a gaze just like a little fox," one of the men tells him—and eventually learns to hold his own: after spending 36 hours in an ad hoc snow cave for a hazing initiation, he's just grateful to be inside again. Early on, things are rough, with angry demands to do the wake-up drill one more time, but eventually Alexei proves his physical worth enough times to be accepted. Not that the timed obstacle-course runs are necessary: there's nothing to defend against out here except bears.

Marczak seems more amused than alarmed by all this, which makes a difference: his film is a portrait of old-school nationalists acting boorishly that doesn't take itself too seriously, wry fun trumping tragedy. With Vladimir Putin's photo prominently displayed in the background and many hypothetical discussions about how to fight/disarm a border transgressor, the point about Russia's frequent antagonism/chauvinist treatment of immigrants, foreigners and citizens of their former satellite republics is made lightly rather than polemically. (Since shorts get so little press coverage, a shout-out here to Chase Whiteside and Erik Stoll's Lifelike, a hypnotic, mostly silent and admirably gruesome depiction of taxidermy from gutting to the final oddly convincing mounted dear-head, an appropriately macho-but-distanced prelude to the feature.)

Subway Preacher is a brutal portrait of self-styled evangelist Brian. So "humbled" he doesn't have a job—the better to hand out Chick Cartoon Tracts and harangue passers-by in subway stations, with signs venomous enough to be posted on the same block as the Westboro Baptist Church—Brian runs a small ministry with a miniscule clientele. At home, devoted wife Rose (his second) makes spaghetti and meatballs on command and doesn't mind that they live in one room of his brother's house. Rose quit her job because Brian believes the man should provide, but he has nothing to provide. That doesn't stop him from criticizing Rose whenever she so much as asks him to turn the TV down a little bit, describing even such a mild request as "Satanic."

Though Brian doesn't seem to perceive any of his own problems, even he can see trouble coming when he falls for Kaitlin, a super-pretty Columbia student who starts dropping evangelical dogma into her social counseling class papers. His solution is to divorce Rose (while still living with her) and then marry and move in with Caitlin, while still doing his ministerial work with the two. Ruthlessly un-self-aware of how badly he behaves, Brian blunders through this film resolutely unfazed. Up to the last scene, he's still hustling, scrounging up donations to buy more tracts telling unbelievers they're going to hell. He's consistently the least sympathetic but compelling documentary profile subject in recent memory.

First-time director Dennis W. Ho breaks up the high drama with very nicely framed static shots of New York's many subway stations, conveying the daily reality and feeling of these regularly overcrowded, brutally utilitarian-looking stations. The core of the film, though, is unambiguous vérité; the result is strong, sometimes cringe-inducing drama. Subway Preacher puts you in the headspace of a devout former bowling champ/porn addict who now conceives of himself as a model of Godly living despite all evidence to the contrary, which proves a grimly enlightening experience.

Posted by ahillis at March 8, 2011 3:11 PM