Summer Hours
France, 2008, 102 minutes
Director: Olivier Assayas
Using the story of a grieving family as the driving narrative, Summer Hours at first feels like a collection of painfully unbearable and pretentious bickering by members of a bourgeois-artistic French family. Upon looking closer, its real protagonists—the ones who change and experience conflict—are the objects around the house.
It’s a touching meditation on the value of art in its function and sentimentality, rather than the intrinsic monetary worth. The film’s sob-worthy finale involves not a performance by an actor, but a shot of a desk displayed in a museum.
My Suicide
USA, 2008, 105 minutes
Director: David Lee Miller
What turns out to be one of the more divisive films of the festival is also one of its best. David Lee Miller's My Suicide is the story of a teen who wants to film his own suicide as his school project. As he draws controversy around him, he reacts by viewing the world he's in through the eyes of the camera. After all, when it's a movie, it's more interesting, right?
One of the main reasons it's generating mixed reactions is its relentless style, which uses mixed media to the point of exhaustion. Gabriel Sunday, who plays suicidal teen Archibald Holden Buster Williams, is an amateur filmmaker who continually presents us with overwhelming animation, skits and movie reenactments. Aside from being a convincing lead, Sunday is also an excellent mimic, copying the famous works of Walken, Brando and Hugo Weaving with precision. It may be tiresome, but it’s also an alarmingly effective portrayal of today’s multimedia junkies, and it captures that age set’s mindframe particularly well. One memorable scene has Archie graphically monologuing about being repressively horny while images of internet porn surround him like Speed Racer’s floating heads. "The green screen is my generation's pogo stick," he claims. It sounds like an absurd statement but one quick skim of YouTube would tell you otherwise.
All that style means nothing, however, if it takes its premise lightly. My Suicide’s power is in its ability to suck an audience’s attention with its dark humor, and then slowly degrade into a serious examination of teen suicide. Archie claims that he wants to die because he sees through the futility of life. After literally experiencing his self-aware way of looking at the world, we buy into his cynicism. A modern-day teenager certainly would. Then when a more conventional reason is revealed later, we buy that too, and we see why Archie refuses to let himself admit it as the real reason he hates his life: it’s too cliche, and that’s the biggest sin of all.
The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle
USA, 2009, 100 minutes
Director: David Russo
Odd, zany, and unmistakably original—that’s how a film about anal butt fish can be so funny without evoking the all-too-easy toilet humor. Instead, The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle treats its aimless youths with a modicum of respect. Their insane banters become the source of humor, while the aforementioned buttfish being the emotional anchor of these characters.
When the night janitors at a research company unwillingly become test subjects for an experimental batch of self-heating cookies, their addiction to the cookies acts as an obvious metaphor for drug addiction, but this slowly turns into an exploration of creative energy and personal responsibility. Finally, the buttbirth allows these male characters to experience motherhood and take a step towards a semblance of maturity.
It’s hard to pin down what exactly this eXistenZ-meets-Dazed and Confused wants to get at, but it’s almost pointless to figure it out, as we are taken on a ride as scary and confusing as the life of a youth-in-crisis is. The film takes that post-grad anxiety and interprets it as an appropriately bizarre, yet funny, visual representation.
