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Jun 27, 2013

The Bling Ring

Grade: B
Sofia Coppola's Golden Lion-winning last film was as aptly titled as any film I've ever seen. Somewhere: conveying the protagonist's lost sense of self despite the consistently defined geography of his life, but also portending the film's most detrimental qualities: its excruciating pace and the sparse storytelling that always maintains an unnecessary distance between the audience and subject. It was a place well-known to Coppola whose upbringing in an elite Hollywood family has formed the core of her thematic interests over her short career, but just "somewhere" to her audience: unknown, unknowable and unappealing.

"The Bling Ring" maintains no such cache. It is superficial and chintzy and direct, but like Somewhere, it tells you what you can expect from the film, or its characters, as the case may be: five Los Angeles high school students whose pastime is robbing from celebrity houses around town and whose lives are defined by an absence of perspective and an obsession with celebrities and their lifestyles. They form a ring and they are after bling and that's really most of what you need to know about them. Not to say that Coppola isn't intelligent enough to understand that there is a bigger, widespread phenomenon that leads to this destructive, stupefying infatuation, but she's also smart enough to know that she can observe the proceedings objectively, almost apathetically and the seemingly meaningless repetition of events will provide her commentary almost as a natural consequence.

This is a film wherein the most silent moments become the richest; wherein Coppola says so much about a society with an insidious fascination with "role models" without saying much at all. This is a generation of kids, "The Hills" and "Kardashian" generation, that is energized, if not quite defined, by exposure and the sharing of as much personal information as possible. Coppola exposes them even further. And yet, though they may reduce their own lives to a map of connected dots between one Facebook event to another, Coppola doesn't treat them as such. She neither condemns them, nor tries to contextualize their choices in a way that would inevitably lead to her critics crying "navel-gazing" yet again.

She patiently follows them through their routine, stripping more and more of their personalities to discover a hollow core. The rinse and repeat structure of her film mirrors the mindless repetition of their lives. These are kids so insecure that they live almost entirely as vessels for the people they unquestioningly adore, and Coppola allows the audience to look at them and question what would be left of their lives if their gossip magazines and rumor blogs are taken away. The skin-deep analysis of characters becomes a blessing for a film that isn't interested in the motives for these specific crimes as much as it is in letting its audience wonder where everything has gone wrong with this collective mentality. It's a question that this film doesn't answer but it dares to quietly ask. Few films find such depth without digging deep at all. The Bling Ring does so to wondrous results.

Jun 13, 2013

A Respectable Family

Grade: B

[Editor's Note: One of the greatest perks of living in a cinematic hub like Toronto is the large number of festivals and retrospectives that run all year long. TIFF, of course, is the parent festival and the organization's year-around activities are the prime destination for any cinephile living in this city, but the smaller festivals offer their own share of pleasures. This year saw the inaugural edition of Scarborough Film Festival, founded by Sergei Petrov, whom I've had the pleasure of knowing from a few years back when we crossed paths somewhere along the TIFF hierarchy. The festival, located at the beautiful Fox theatre along the seaside, southeastern edge of Toronto, was a success by all measures and will surely grow into a landmark summer event as years go by, since Scarborough's culturally diverse demographic and the dreamy locale that hosts the festival provide the perfect platform for a rising festival slightly removed from the frenzy of downtown.]

Scarborough Film Festival's closing piece was a film from Iran, which felt like a real blessing, given the relative lack of imports from Iranian cinema today. It's a film called A Respectable Family, by director Masoud Bakhshi. Bakhshi's first film, Tehran Has No More Pomegranates! has found something of a cult following among Iranian cinephiles so I was quite happy to catch up with his work here. All the more so when the jury announced prior to the screening that the Bakhshi was the runner-up for the festival's best director prize.

A Respectable Family tells the story of Arash (Babak Hamidian), a young Iranian university professor who has spent the last 22 years of his life serving the academia in Europe. Upon receiving an invitation from the University of Shiraz in his native city, Arash heads back home to spend a year as a guest professor; but Iran's many political upheavals have created an entirely different atmosphere from the one he'd left behind. Yet, it isn't his unfamiliarity with the academic system or the city of Shiraz at large that discomforts him the most; it's his dysfunctional family, ravaged by decades of betrayal and war.

Arash's father, an ostensibly pious man who provided people with food during the Iran-Iraq conflict, had actually committed one of the greatest crimes during that war: hoarding. The minimal amount of resources he provided to the people in need paled in comparison with what he hid in his storage to sell for magnified prices. His personal life was no less tainted than his social one - he had been married prior to his communion with Arash's mother (played by two of my favorite Iranian actresses, a young Behnaz Jafari and an older Ahu Kheradmand), though the marriages had been kept secret from both wives. Arash, as a result, had two brothers: a half brother called Jafar (Mehran Ahmadi) from his father's previous marriage and a blood brother who has been killed in the war after his father had persuaded him to join the forces. Arash's mother, blaming her husband not just for cheating, but for losing their son to war, had shunned the man and chosen to live the rest of her life alone and on a very minimal income.

Jun 10, 2013

Monday's Words of Wisdom


"Much Ado was shot cheaply and quickly while the director was occupied with the mighty labor of The Avengers, and it is in every way superior to that bloated, busy blockbuster. Also shorter. Do not suppose that this is reflexive literary snobbery or a preposterous apple-and-orange comparison. Shakespeare’s knotty double plot, propelled by friendships, rivalries and a blithe spirit at once romantic and cynical, is a better vehicle for Mr. Whedon’s sensibilities than the glowering revenger’s tale that every superhero movie is forced, these days, to become."
- From A. O. Scott's review of Joss Whedon's charming Much Ado About Nothing