Unrequited Lust. Films reviewed: On Chesil Beach, Hurley, M/M
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com.
Inside out, Toronto’s LGBT film fest is on now, premiering movies from around the world, from Thailand to South Africa and showcasing innovative short films by new directors.
Unrequited love is a common theme, but what about unrequited lust? This week I’m looking at three movies — two dramas and a doc. There’s a honeymoon couple whose marital bliss isn’t; a racing car driver with a need for speed, and a guy in Berlin who lusts after a lookalike… in a coma.
On Chesil Beach
Dir: Dominic Cooke, based on Ian McEwan’s novel
It’s England in 1962. Florence (Saorise Ronan) is a confident musician who leads a string quintet in Oxford. She comes from an uptight, stuck up, and upper class Tory family. Edward (Billie Howle) is a country bumpkin from a rural home a bus ride away. He’s emotionally raw and quick to anger. He can’t tell a baguette from a croissant but can identify a bird just from its call.
He comes from an eccentric family, with pre-raphaelite twin sisters, a kindly father, and an artist mother suffering 
from a brain injury. She can’t remember new names and takes off her clothes in public. Florence and Edward meet at random at a nuclear disarmament meeting (CND) and it’s love at first sight. She loves his realness and disdain for money and social conventions. And he is stricken by her beauty, her musical skills, and most of all her kindness – she can even pull his mother out of her shell. They marry.
But the honeymoon at a second rate hotel on a pebble-strewn beach starts bad and gets worse. The closer they get to the marital bed, the farther they get from sex. And after a disastrous attempt, they flee the bedroom for the rocky beach. Can true love rescue an awful honeymoon? Or will this be the end?
On Chesil Beach is a moving look at relationships, and a bit of a tear jerker, too. Though the beach scenes are at its centre, the film flashes back in time to reveal crucial secrets — and into a possible future — as the two lovers have it out. While not a perfect movie, I’ve seen it twice now and I liked it better the second time… which is a good sign.
Hurley
Wri/Dir Derek Dodge
Daytona, Florida is the site of a renowned race car competition, where teams speed along a circuit keeping their cars running for 24 hours without stopping. The drivers too have to continue functioning at high speeds negotiating perilous turns while fighting 
exhaustion. Even a momentary break in concentration could lead to a crash.
Machismo rules, and winners flaunt their masculinity and sense of cool. It’s a world filled with photo-ops beside bikini-clad penthouse models, aboard expansive yachts. It’s also a big-money professional sport, whose champions land lucrative endorsements, prize money, sponsorships and cushy positions at car dealerships. Image is everything.
The kings of Daytona have long been the Brumos Porsche team, who drove to victory in the 1970s under Peter Gregg. He was arrogant and successful. He was later joined by Hurley Haywood, a shy but highly skilled racer. Together they were known as Batman and Robin. Eventually Haywood headed the team himself in Daytona and La Mans, chalking up countless wins. This new documentary chronicals Haywood’s career and his personal life.
So why is a movie about race cars playing at Inside Out?
SPOILER ALERT!
Because Hurley Haywood is the first race car champ to publicly come out as gay… which makes this film a historic record.
Hurley is a squeaky-clean documentary about the famous race car driver, and is mainly of interest to fans of that sport, whom, I am told, are legion. I’m not one of them, but could still appreciate the cool cars and vintage pics. I felt like I was playing with hot wheels again.
M/M
Wri/Dir: Drew Lint
Matthieu (Antoine Lahaie) is a Montrealer living in a small apartment in Berlin. During the day he works as a lifeguard at a local swimming pool (or does he?). At night he’s clubbing to flashing lights and dark shadows. And then 
there are his dreams – realistic visions of interactions with stone statues and human flesh. (He rarely meets living people.)
One day he encounter Matthias (Nicolas Maxim Endlicher) online and follows him into the swimming pool showers. Matthias has a thin moustache, a buzz cut and a perfectly 
symmetrical body and face. The words Sodom and Gomorrah are tattooed on his torso. He works as a fashion model and poses for a digital sculpture created using a 3-D printer. Matthieu is infatuated with Matthias, mimics his style, and stalks him to his apartment window. It’s a minimalist palace of white walls, blown-up black and white photos and a chin-up bar. Matthieu longs to meet him, but there’s no real connection. But when Matthias falls into a coma after a crash, Matthieu — like Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley — moves into his home and takes over his life. Soon he has a parade of sex 
partners visiting him who thinks he’s the other guy. But what will happen to Matthew when Matthias comes home? And how far will one M go to duplicate, or replace, the other M?
M/M is a highly stylized, dreamlike and surreal look at superficial relationships and the dangers they pose. This Berlin is inhabited only by gay fashion plates in their twenties, posing against shiny white surfaces or pausing for sexual release in washrooms or saunas. Most dialogue is disjointed telephone conversations 
or short texts sent on gay dating sites; and the sex scenes fall somewhere between MMA and interpretive dance.
The story is intentionally ambiguous, so you never know if you’re seeing dreams, fantasies or actual events, nor even which M is dreaming what. Still, this dazzling art-house fest of image and music manages to hold together.
This is the best movie I’ve seen at Inside Out, but if you miss it there, it opens commercially on June 1.
On Chesil Beach opens today in Toronto; check your local listings. Hurley and M/M are both playing at the Inside Out Film Fest.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com.
Changes. Films reviewed: Venus, RBG, Boom for Real
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com.
Spring Film Festival Season is going strong in Toronto with world premiers, features and short films to reflect every taste. Inside Out is one of the world’s largest LGBT film festivals; ICFF, the Italian Contemporary film festival, has parallel screenings in eight cities across Canada; and Toronto’s Japanese Film Festival features great movies and a special appearance by Nobel Peace Prize co-recipient Setsuko Thurlow. And brand new this year is Toronto’s True Crime Film Festival – the title says it all. They’re all coming soon.
This week I’m looking at three new movies – a dramedy ad two documentaries – opening today, which (coincidentally) are all directed by women. There’s a teenaged boy who changes New York’s art scene, a diminutive judge who changes US laws, and a woman in her thirties who just wants to change herself.
Venus
Dir: Eisha Marjara
Sid (DeBargo Sanyal) is a Montrealer in her thirties going through some major changes. Her longtime boyfriend Daniel (Pierre-Yves Cardinal: Tom at the Farm) dumped her, and a strange, 14-year-old kid has been following her 
around. But the biggest change of all is her gender – she’s transitioning from male to female, and is about to appear as a woman, in public, for the very first time. That’s when Ralph (Jamie Mayers) the 14 year 
old skate kid who’s been following her around finally tells her why: Sid, he says, you’re my dad!
What?! First of all, she says, I only have sex with men, second of all I’m brown – Sid is of a Punjabi ancestry – and you’re white. But doesn’t she remember Kristin from high school? (Kristin is 
Ralph’s mom and Ralph read in her diary that she had a fling with Sid as a teenager).
When she gets over the shock Sid takes a crash course in Parenting for Dummies, and starts to bond with Ralph. Her 
ex-partner Daniel reappears in her life, and accepts her change of gender. And her estranged parents, her transphobic Mamaji (Zena Darawalla) and laid-back Papaji (Gordon Warnecke: My 
Beautiful Launderette), welcome her back with open arms when they discover they’re grandparents. But trouble lurks. Will Daniel come out publicly as her partner? Will Ralph tell his Mom he found his birth parent? And will Sid survive the stress of transition?
Venus is a very cute dramedy, one that shows pathos without too much treacle, and keeps you interested. And the cast is uniformly believable and endearing, especially the principals: Sanyal, Mayers and Cardinal.
RBG
Dir: Julie Cohen, Betsy West
In 1970s America it was not illegal to refuse women bank loans without a man’s signature, to fire them for being pregnant, to pay them less than men, to bar them from public schools, private clubs and other institutions… even for husbands to rape their own wives.
Enter noted lawyer Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Born in Brooklyn, she is one of few female students at Harvard Law in the 1950s which helps shape her legal outlook. She observes the oppression and panic of 
the Red Scare. She also experiences discrimination first hand, as she and other women are ignored by professors and barred from accessing archives. Later, she works for the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) and begins to challenge laws that discriminate against women, 
one at a time, through lawsuits. Many of her cases make it to the all-male Supreme Court, whose members understand civil rights on the basis of race, but can’t yet conceive of it on the basis of sex.
She teaches them what’s what.
Later this diminutive, shy woman becomes a law professor, a circuit judge in the Washington, D.C. Appeals Court and eventually a Supreme Court 
justice herself, often leading dissenting positions on the increasingly conservative court. More recently, in her eighties, she has been adopted by young feminist activists as a “rock star” or celebrity of sorts; an unusual role model for a youth-obsessed culture.
RBG is an interesting and informative – if conventional – look at her policies, her home life, her late husband, and her love of opera.
Boom For Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat
Dir: Sara Driver
It’s 1978 and New York is a bombed out city. Crime rates are soaring, the government is bankrupt, and poor neighbourhoods like the Lower East side are abandoned and crumbling. With hard times come big changes. Both Punk rock and hip hop culture 
are developing side by side, and into this incubator steps a 16 year old boy named Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Born in Brooklyn, the son of a Haitian Dad and a Puerto Rican mom, Jean Michel is homeless, 
kicked out for dropping out of high school. Now he’s couch-surfing in the lower east side, and becoming an artist. He expresses himself as SAMO, a graffiti artist. But instead of the 
bold, chunky murals and tags that cover the subways Jean-Michel scrawls pensive poetry and enigmatic thoughts using plain – though distinctive — letters. He later develops his images – childlike hearts, crosses, three pointed crowns, Batman and science books – and applies them to diverse media: everything from walls, to clothing, to refrigerator doors. He targets walls near Soho, so galleries will notice. He already 
thinks of himself as a superstar, just one who is not famous yet.
But Soho galleries don’t care much about youth, punk, hip hop or black culture in general. So the artists create their own spaces in a DIY mode. Still a teenager he attends seminal art happenings and events around the city, whether or not he is actually invited, spontaneously adding his art directly 
to gallery walls And he refines his distinctive look, with short dreads and a partly shaved skull.
Boom for Real is a brilliant documentary about an artist life before his incredible fame in the art boom of the 1980s and his untimely death. It situates him within an era: of Fab 5 Freddy and Planet Rock; Club 57 and the Mudd Club; Grafitti art, Jim Jarmusch, club kids and Quaaludes, fashion, music, rap and art. It’s the best sort of documentary, one that functions as a constantly-flowing oral history told by the people who were there. It shows a fantastic array of period photos, videos and images documenting Basquiat’s teenaged years. Even the closing credits are thoughtfully laid out.
Beautiful movie.
Venus, RBG, and Boom for Real all open today in Toronto; check your local listings.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com.
Christoph Schlingensief: Approach those you fear. Films discussed: The German Chainsaw Massacre, The 120 Days of Bottrop, Foreigners Out! Schliegensief’s Container
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Christoph Schlingensief was a performance artist, TV producer and filmmaker known for his pranks. A Till Eulenspiegel for the new millenium. He was born in 1960 in Oberhausen, Germany and made his first film while still a kid. He became a devotee of avant garde film, music videos, mainstream Hollywood, and the New German Cinema.
His work incorporates Brechtian theatre techniques and its exaggerated, in-your-face style. In any given film you can find contemporary art, TV clips, historical footage, and even samples of his own past work, edited into the project. He became widely known in German-
speaking Europe — though not outside it — for his TV shows, especially an impromptu talk show shot on Berlin’s U-Bahn. Sadly, he died of cancer in 2010 at the age of 49.
You’ve probably never seen his work, so this week, I’m going to talk about a special series of three movies now playing in Toronto, sponsored by the Goethe Institut (and co-presented by the Laser Blast Film Society and KinoVortex). There’s a look at German unification using cannibal serial killers, an epitaph to New German Cinema in the form of naked people running rampant, and a take on right-wing politcs and xenophobia using a mock reality show… that “deports” undocumented immigrants!
The German Chainsaw Massacre (1990) (Das deutsche Kettensägen Massaker a.k.a. Blackest Heart)
It’s Germany just after the reunification of East and West. Almost everyone has moved westward, but a tiny few remain in the East. This includes the beautiful but downtrodden Clara (Karina Fallenstein) who is repeatedly abused by her drunk husband. She fights him off with a kitchen knife, jumps into her Trabant and heads for greener 
pastures. But little does she know, she’s going from bad… to wurst.
She meets up with her boyfriend Artur only to see a stranger slash up poor Artur’s body. And when she seeks help at roadside inn, she’s accosted by a sex-craazed lesbian dressed in black (Sussanne Bredehöft, who also plays Clara’s husband), 
and her equally weird colleagues. Behind closed doors they put rubber masks on anyone who stays there and brutally chops them up before grinding them into sausage. Can Clara defeat these evil cannibals? Or will she end up on someone’s BBQ?
The German Chainsaw Massacre is the second chapter of Schlingensief’s German Trilogy. It’s a genuine horror movie, but so over-the-top that you can’t take it seriously. Its actually very funny, in a disgusting sort of way, mimicking American slasher movies while also satirizing German fears of reunification. (I think it’s also a comment on how ordinary people in the East were treated like pack animals — or sausages! — to feed the hungry West German labour market.)
The 120 Days of Bottrop (1997)
Whatever happened to German Cinema? Schlingensief wants to know. Where are the great directors like Fassbinder, the stars like the beautiful Romy Schneider and 70s heartthrob Helmut Berger? So he decides to get Fassbinder’s stars back together again to film a remake of Pasolini’s most controversial movie: Salo or 120 days of Sodom.
The original film was about Nazi occupied northern Italy, where they conducted horrific S&M orgies using people as sex slaves for their entertainment. This new
version, though, is a low budget German art film, and the actors only agree to come out of retirement for the chance of working with Helmut Berger (or maybe sex with the nude models.)
But professional jealousy and rivalry soon takes over, and everything falls apart. The “director” is a mock-Fassbinder complete with fake moustache, while the cast is composed of leches and divas who are going crazy, entering dementia or attempting suicide.
Can this film ever be made? And will Helmut ever show up?
This film is a panoply of meta-references to other movies. Schlingensief is there as Jesus on the cross (who a Klansman tries to set on fire) alongside medieval nuns (Pasolini-style), New York pop-art fashion (Warhol-style), with cameo performances ranging from the omnipresent Udo Kier, to Roland Emerich, Germany’s big-budget schlockmeister. Bottrop is a funny (if ridiculous) satirical look at the last gasp of New German Cinema.
Foreigners Out! Schliegensief’s Container (2002)
Dir: Paul Poet
It’s June 2000 in peaceful, culture-loving Vienna, when something unheard of happens. The conservative party forms a coalition with the ÖVP, Austria’s extreme rightwing Freedom party, headed by Nazi apologist Jörg Haider. The ÖVP is populist and xenophobic, portraying asylum seekers as drug dealers and killers (sound familiar?). That’s when Christoph Schlingensief set up a display – inside a shipping container – right beside Vienna’s Opera house, called Please Love Austria, to commemorate 
this coalition.
He brought in a dozen people of varied ethnicities, dressed them in fright wigs and let them live there for a week on display, in person and online, 24/7. And like the reality show Big Brother, viewers are asked to vote to evict two contestants each day. The catch is, these evicted contestants, whom he says are illegal immigrants, are led off by security guards and (supposedly) deported! And just in case you didn’t get the message, a huge white banner on the container’s roof says: Ausländer Raus! (Foreigners Out!) And Schlingensief gleefully announces the colour of the people Austrians vote to deport – dark skin first, light skin later.
Naturally, this art installation triggers extreme reactions. On the far right, people began to shout and demonstrate to deport all foreigners. Some leftists take it at 
face value, and attempt to storm the container to “rescue” the so-called foreigners and tear down the sign. And many in the middle hate the negative attention it brought to Austria… though it’s Austria that voted Haider in.
This documentary covers the art installation and the public reaction to it over its week-long run. And punctuated it with the media coverage it received, notably from the Krone group of wildly popular tabloids, who many blame for Haider’s election.
The show never overtly takes the standpoint of the immigrants. They’re just props in his sideshow. Rather it exposes society’s creepiest undercurrents that are usually kept hidden. And it illustrates Schlingensief’s theory that the best way to expose the worst beliefs is to repeat them out loud where everyone can hear them. The louder the better.
It’s only through exaggeration that we can show reality. This exhibit ran almost twenty years ago, but I think anyone can see that it’s more relevant now than ever.
The German Chainsaw Massacre, 120 Days of Bottrop, and Foreigners Out! Schliegensief’s Container are playing on May 10th, 15th and 17th at the Tiff Bell Lightbox as part of Goethe Institiute’s three-part tribute to avant garde filmmaker Christoph Schlingensief.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com.
Source: Christof Schlingensief: art without borders, (c) 2010, Tara Forrest and Anna Teresa Scheer, editors, with a foreward by Alexander Kluge.
Daniel Garber talks with director Adam Bhala Lough about Alt Right: Age of Rage at #Hotdocs
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Photos by Jeff Harris.
In post-WWII America, the extreme right operated undercover. Klansmen wore hoods and Nazis were reviled in the mainstream. But recently — especially since the election of Donald Trump — the 
ultra-right has re-emerged as a significant, recognizable group. And under self-proclaimed leaders like Richard Spencer, they have redubbed themselves the “alt right”. But what is the alt right, who are its members and what do they want?
Alt Right, Age of Rage is a new documentary that looks at this rise, which culminated in the notoriously violent, 
torchlit rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017. The film follows neo-Nazis like Spencer and their encounters with anti-fascist protesters like Daryle Lamont Jenkins. The film was directed by Adam Bhala Lough, known for documenting fringe 
political groups, whether on the left, the right or neither. Alt Right: Age of Rage had its Canadian debut at Hotdocs Toronto’s International Documentary Film Festival.
I spoke with Adam in studio at CIUT.
He talked about the “Alt Right”, Richard Spencer, Jared Taylor, white supremacy, platforming, Charlottesville, The Southern Poverty Law Centre, Daryle Lamont Jenkins, Antifa… and more!
Alt Right: Age of Rage premiered at Toronto’s Hot Docs International Documentary Film Festival.
Three Historical Dramas. Films reviewed: Budapest Noir, An Act of Defiance, Bye Bye Germany
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com.
Spring Film Festival Season continues in Toronto, with Hotdocs rounding up its fnal weekend. Remember, daytime tickets to these amazing documentaries are free for all students and seniors.
And starting up now is Toronto’s Jewish Film Festival, featuring comedies, dramas, TV and documentaries from around the world. This week I’m looking at three historical dramas now playing at TJFF. There’s a mystery/thriller set in Budapest in the 30s, a comedy/drama in Frankfurt in the 40s, and a courtroom drama in Pretoria in the 60s.
Budapest Noir
Dir: Éva Gárdos
It’s 1936, and everyone in Budapest is preparing for the state funeral of Prime Minister Gyula Gömbös. Everyone but cynical reporter Szigmond Gordon (Krisztián Kolovratnik). Crime’s his beat, not politics and cigarettes and bourbon
are his life’s blood. And his only distraction is a beautiful woman. So he’s pleasantly surprised when he meets a mysterious woman in a downtown cafe. But today’s potential love interest is tomorrow’s news story when he finds her body in a pool of blood.
He calls on his ex-girlfriend Kristina, a photographer (Réka Tenki) to take pics of the crimes scene. (She’s back in Budapest after smuggling shocking photos out of Germany.) But when he tries to 
investigate the murder, he faces roadblocks at every turn, with no one but Kristina to help him. The chief of police, the politicians, and even members of the underworld seem to be blocking him from finding the truth. And for some reason her body has disappeared from the morgue.
His search leads him to pornographers, fascist gangs, a coffee
importer, a secret communist meeting, a madame at a brothel, and a punch-drunk boxer, all in an attempt to solve the mystery. Will he find what he seeks? Or is he digging too deep, uncovering things journalists aren’t supposed to see?
Budapest Noir is a look at the underbelly of a huge city in turmoil in turbulent times. It’s presented in a film noir style, narrated by a Bogart-type character complete with trenchcoat and hat, and borrows images from dozens of famous movies. Occasionally it veers from pastiche into parody with all its hollywood memes, but generally it’s a solid and well-acted homage, full of surprises.
An Act of Defiance
Dir: Jean Van De Velde
It’s 1963 in South Africa. The police raid a secret meeting in a farm house in Rivonia, arresting everyone there. The meeting was by the heads of umKhonto we Sizwe, the paramilitary wing of the African National Congress. Charged with sabotage, the accused face death by hanging, and it looks like they’re heading that way. Until a respected white Afrikaner lawyer, Bram Fischer (Peter Paul Muller), agrees to head the defence team. The 
defendants include Walter Sisulu, Harold Wolpe and none other than Nelson Mandela himself.
But the prosecutors are working hand-in-hand with the police, the 
government and the secret service. They tap phones, record private lawyer-client conversations, and send spies out at night to take pictures through windows. Turns out Fischer is not just a random defence lawyer helping out; he has deep ties to the anti-apartheid movement. As the trial progresses, he and his 
family become the targets of underhanded campaigns. Can he convince a conservative judge to save the defendents’ lives? Or will they, and he, end up in the gallows?
This is a fascinating and intense courtroom drama, about a 
period of South African history largely unknown outside of that country. It includes Mandela’s famous “I’m prepared to die” speech given during the trial, but he and the other defendents are minor characters. It’s mainly about Fischer and his family, including his wife Mollie (beautifully played by Antoinette Louw) and the fight against apartheid. It also includes some thrilling moments about the family avoiding an evil police force.
This is another good film to catch.
Bye Bye Germany (Es war einmal in Deutschland)
Dir: Sam Garbarski (Based on the novels of Michel Bergmann)
It’s occupied Frankfurt just after WWII. A quarter of a million holocaust survivors are living in DP (displaced persons) camps in central Europe, run by allied forces. They’re waiting to emigrate to America or Palestine. But in the meantime they have to support themselves. Enter David Bermann (Moritz Bleibtreu) a sweet-talking teller of tales with a pencil thin mustache and a mysterious past. He says his family has been in 
dry goods for generations. So he recruits a ragtag bunch of salesmen to help peddle his linens. But they wonder why he keeps disappearing for hours at a time. Where does he go?
He’s being interrogated by the stern but beautiful Special Agent 
Sara Simon (Antje Traue) a German-speaking G.I. assigned to weed out war criminals and collaborators from among the refugees. Why was Bermann given special treatment by the SS? His answer? He told funny jokes. Will Sara believe his outlandish stories? Will his business venture pan out? And will he and his friends make enough money to say Auf Wiedersehen to Deutschland?
Bye Bye Germany is a very entertaining, but bittersweet, memoir of life as a jew in postwar Frankfurt. Antje Traue is the perfect foil for Bleibtreu’s charming but sketchy Bermann. I liked this movie.
You can catch Bye Bye Germany, An Act of Defiance and Budapest Noir at TJFF over the next two weeks. Go to TJFF.com for details.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com.
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