Sydney Film Festival Report 2019: Diverse Digressions

For Australian cinephiles, the start of the Sydney Film Festival is the beginning of the year’s continuous run of International film festivals, which includes MIFF, Revelations and Adelaide, all of which showcase different programs of new Australian and international pictures.

This year at the 2019 Sydney Film Festival, the near-fortnight’s worth of titles included a string of recent Cannes hits, such as Parasite, Bacurau, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Girl and The Dead Don’t Die, as well as a variety of hot new festival favourites like High Life, Her Smell, The Nightingale and Amazing Grace. This year, I had the opportunity again to screen a selection of the diverse titles on offer, a trio of intriguing entries that deliver three interesting entries from across the globe.

Synonyms (Nadav Lapid)

As one of the major emerging artists of mainstream Israeli cinema, the films of Nadav Lapid present themselves primarily as portraits of people in the midst of identity crisis, with characters who are attempting to resist an imposed political existence against their own developing personal ideology. Lapid’s two previous features, Policeman and The Kindergarten Teacher (remade for Netflix last year), dealt with these problems through two wholly different professions – the titular gigs – which makes his Golden Bear-winning third outing, Synonyms, feel somewhat similar, but with one major difference; a protagonist who has walked away from his employment and socio-political confines, only to discover that cultural assimilation isn’t as easy as a change of wardrobe.

This lost soul in the centre is Yoav (newcomer Tom Mercier), a young Israeli man who has shed his military career in favour for reassembling himself as a French citizen, whose naive, backpacker swagger is immediately abolished on his first night. After his only possessions are stolen whilst squatting within an abandoned Parisian apartment, Yoav is forced to literally remodel himself within his new surroundings (Lapid’s script, co-written with his father Haim, is rarely subtle), aided by a generous French couple (Louise Chevillotte and Quentin Dolmaire), who kickstart his surrealistic identity transformation that feels more circular than progressive.

Yoav’s change (or lack thereof) is documented in a fragmented, episodic style that frustrates more than it absorbs, characters come and go at random and despite Tom Mercier’s terrific anchoring performance, the mustard-jacketed runaway feels more like an allegorical conduit, rather than a real person searching for meaning. A keen interest in the current Israeli political landscape is required for full enjoyment, despite its explicit subject matter of masculinity and nationality, and especially at a lengthy 2 hours, it merely reinforces themes that Lapid has tackled before – which feels appropriate to say for a film titled Synonyms.

Saturday Afternoon (Mostofa Sarwar Farooki)

During the past couple of years, the concept of the long-take, aided by advancements in digital film-making and the need to impress a new generation of audiences, has become quite popular, as Hitchc*ck‘s falsified one-take concept of Rope has now developed into actual single shot feature films. Popularised by Sebastian Schipper’s German bank heist thriller Victoria, the idea of keeping the audience within the one frame – denying them the catharsis of a cutaway or change in perspective – has been used to its most discomforting degree in Mostofa Sarwar Farooki’s Saturday Afternoon, which transports viewers into the midst of a horrifying terrorist attack in the capital of Bangladesh.

Loosely inspired by the tragic Holey Artisan Bakery attack of 2016, where over 20 hostages were killed by Islamic extremists, Saturday Afternoon unflinchingly imagines what transpired in the tense period of time between the initial attack and when the police stormed the building. Cleverly captured without a cut by Aziz Zhambakiev, the real time tedium of its unbroken 80 minute run-time gradually embroils the audience within the unravelling drama between the paradoxical religious ideology of the gun-wielding terrorists and the diverse hostages they terrify within their held-up cafe.

Arguments regarding the “true” nature of Islam fuel a majority of the correspondence between the parties, with each growing gradually anxious as the unnamed terrorists have no qualms with hastily murdering anybody that speaks out of line. Similar to Anthony Maras’ equally harrowing Hotel Mumbai, the film refuses to hold back (a pregnant woman is shot point blank right at the beginning), in trying to pay respects to the victims of not only this massacre, but any casualties caused by religious extremism. Farooki’s candid treatment of events, alongside his technically-impressive recreation of it, transcends any interpretations of exploitation or notions of “cheap” drama, instead he has formed a powerful statement that practically speaks for itself.

Why Don’t You Just Die? (Kirill Sokolov)

At first glance, it’d be incredibly easy to define Why Don’t You Just Die? as an expendable Quentin Tarantino/Edgar Wright homage that deals out excessive violence and morbid laughs in equal measures. But thankfully, due to its twisty plot and keen sense of self-awareness, Kirill Sokolov’s debut emerges as something more, a macabre tribute to post-modern crime cinema that plays more like an extended Ilya Naishuller-directed Leningard music video than simply another tale of back-stabbing gangsters chasing a loose bag of loot.

Matvey (Aleksandr Kuznetsov) – ironically donned in a Batman jumper – has arrived at veteran policeman Andrei’s (Vitaliy Khaev) apartment with one goal – kill his girlfriend’s father, who she claims abused her throughout her entire childhood. Armed with a hammer and the world’s most durable anatomy, things go south quickly as Andrei is not a man willing to go down without a fight, and as their enclosed war violently erupts – and the title’s query makes itself quite clear – a warped web of characters, motivations and betrayals reveal themselves, if any of them can make it out of Andrei’s apartment alive.

When a CRT TV is hurled at Matvey’s head within the first fight scene, Sokolov pointedly reveals his tongue to be firmly placed in cheek, bringing the goriest episode of Looney Tunes to life as he makes sure to punish each character as viciously as possible (a Wilhelm Scream is used to full winking effect). One scene in particular has Matvey handcuffed in a dingy bathroom, where an aggravated Andrei walks in with a power drill – the tension isn’t if he’s going to use the power drill, but moreso how long he’ll punctuate his legs with the spinning tool, stretching out the torture to its maximum cartoonish conclusion.

Surely there’s some social discourse to gather amongst the swelling chaos, especially in the David vs Goliath struggle between the young millennial and the aged crooked cop, but this chamber piece is more concerned with offended chuckles than disrupting the discourse and for that, Sokolov succeeds handsomely. There’s a definitive control of tone and command behind the camera – Dmitriy Ulyukaev captures each brawl with a palpable viscerality that echoes late Guy Ritchie and Takashi Miike – that manages to nail the tricky balance between indulging in a great visual imagination and an artistic discipline that makes its moments of shocking Grand Guignol practically jump off the screen.

Are there any current festival films that you’re excited for? Let us know in the comments!