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66th BFI London Film Festival: Dare

The “Dare” segment of the London Film Festival delivers another host of international releases, unified by their aims to challenge, shock or subvert and deliver audiences surreal tales of the fresh and the unexpected. From Finland we have the absurdist comic drama The Woodcutter Story, from Iran we have the gripping doppelganger thriller Subtraction, Switzerland brings us historical drama with Unrest, and we also have two films making their world premieres at the festival: the UK’s mystery drama Inland and from Cote d’Ivore and the audacious West African musical family drama Xalé.

Xalé (dir. Moussa Sene Absa, Ivory Coast)

There exists a common presumption among many resistant to progressive ideals and social change, particularly globally, that all movement towards feminism or queer rights etc. is a form of colonialist Westernization. Certainly, European traditions and social movements have had a huge impact on the world, not all of it for ill, but there are significant falsehoods with this presumption. It overlooks the fact many global cultures were significantly more progressive (by modern standards) before they were colonized by Europeans than they became afterwards, with Western churches and trading companies wielding huge amounts of social power to disenfranchise vulnerable parties and install Western values and conceptions of societal roles.

At the peak of colonization, Western cultures were not necessarily, or even often, more liberal than the cultures they subjugated. The advance towards libertarian and equitable values in the West has been a relatively recent development by the standards of world history. We may presume that American and European exports are leading the charge towards positive social change in many parts of the world, but to pretend that it is the only reason the fights for civil rights are taking place in parts of Africa and Asia erroneously robs the people of these countries the dignity of agency and plays into the hands of those who would resist such change under the banner of traditions and national identity.

Experiencing stories of the emancipation and self-actualization of women, queer people and other people whom societies across the globe have sought to marginalize, as told by the societies themselves shows the truth in this assertion. Social progress need not be an appropriation of Western or European influence, it can be a rediscovery and reassertion of one’s own cultural pride and national identity. One such example is Xalé, a dramatic, effervescent, musical family drama of love, hope, trauma and revenge, one exploring the rights, agency and self-actualization of its female characters in ways that take root in the culture and beliefs of West Africa.

Xalé opens with a murder, or perhaps, our instincts will tell us, an execution. Twenty-five year old single mother Awa (Nguissaly Barry) seduces a drunken Atoumane (Ibrahima Mbaye) back to his home. Once he is at her mercy, she stabs him to death and leaves with her head held high. We then flash back to when Awa was fifteen, when Atoumane gave reason to her wrath. Such a flashback structure was a choice worth interrogating. So equipped with hindsight, when we first meet Awa and Atoumane, we are quick to make a guess and likely an accurate one, as to what drove Awa to need such cold-blooded vengeance.

On her deathbed, Awa’s grandmother expresses her husband’s dying wish, that Awa’s aunt Fatou (Rokhaya Niang) marry her cousin, though she loves another, leaving her trapped in a loveless and abusive marriage to Atoumane. Meanwhile Awa is courting an eligible young man of her own choosing, and her twin brother Adama (Mabeye Diol) is dreaming of making the perilous journey across the sea to Paris.

The interleaving stories of these family members are accompanied by the presence of a chorus of sorts: spirits watching in judgement and providing comment on the stories, often through song. It’s an audacious and inspired choice that marks Xalé out and earns it points for creativity, presenting the drama as a semi-musical that stirs the senses and enriches the experience. Xalé is a warm, engaging film with endearing characters (in most cases) that touches on difficult subjects like rape and domestic assault, and debates like abortion and migration, in a way that’s not overly sentimental or sanitary, but still instructive and poetically idealized, and invested with a wealth of individual perspective and nuance. It’s an entertaining, often magical, and engaging drama that solves its challenges with sparkling creativity, while subtly and humbly imparting big ideas and surprising modern perspectives. Speaking as a Briton, it’s a perfect example of how world cinema can be rich and rewarding in lateral ways our native cinema never could be.

The Woodercutter Story (dir. Mikko Myllylahti, Finland)

Watch fifty or so movies, especially without getting a say in which ones they are, and you’ll inevitably come across one or two you really don’t enjoy even a tiny bit. Every year has at least a couple of films that make me question my policies of watching as many as I can and not turning back on a film once I’ve started it. 2022’s festival has been remarkably rewarding though and until now, that hadn’t happened. Still, it was inevitable that at least one film would come along and drive me to distraction with how tepid, bland, annoyingly deadpan, repetitive, unfunny and slow it was, and sadly the task of providing me with my first truly irritating viewing experience of the festival fell to the Finnish existential black comedy The Woodcutter Story.

I should first concede something before I get too harsh in my treatment of The Woodcutter Story. Even if this had been good, I don’t think I’d have liked it, because it’s trying to follow in the footsteps of celebrated and critically acclaimed movies I also hated. So if you’re a fan of Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismaki and his brand of deadpan, surreal tragicomedy, you might find this a lot more bearable than I did. However, I will still say that as much as I didn’t enjoy Le Havre or The Other Side of Hope, I did at least see what they were going for and get that they have a particular kind of whimsical charm and strange oddball poignancy about them. There are also, very, very brief moments when I see something similar in The Woodcutter Story. There’s talking pike and strange spectral dogs that act as soul reapers, charlatan spiritualists, anti-capitalist social commentary, jealous crimes of passion, on paper, you could make it sound really exciting, eclectic and fun.

Sadly though, fun is the last thing I’d call The Woodcutter Story. Deadpan just isn’t my thing. Having characters deliver their lines in the most ponderous, unexpressive fashion imaginable doesn’t make me laugh and it gets so, so wearying for scene after scene with no energy onscreen whatsoever. This movie has dramatic and exciting things that happen, but we get the blandest, most tedious version of them imaginable.

The film follows Pepe (Jarkko Lahti) an eternally optimistic and stoic husband and father, and the woodcutter of the title. Following the closure of the lumber firm where he works – apparently instigated by God selling away his village in the film’s opening – he and his fellow townspeople suffer a series of tragedies. Some die, some move away, some surrender to the madness and others seek answers wherever they might find them, while Pepe clings to his young son and hopes things will work out in the end.

Granted this tale of Job is only meant to be very darkly humorous, I wasn’t expecting it to be laugh a minute, but if you’re not going to make me laugh, nor care, would it be too much to ask to make me think? The style this film adopts is inadept for any real sense of engagement, either emotional or intellectual. Yes, I can look at this or that scene, turn it upside down and shake some meaning out of it without too much effort, and I can see how in a different film such and such a moment might feel poignant or even tragic. But there’s just nothing exciting about the way The Woodcutter Story expresses itself. There’s no spark or warmth or energy, compassion or flavor, or any of the other things I look for in the art I like to consume.

If films like this do it for you and you’re a massive fan of Roy Andersson or Aki Kaurismaki, maybe you’ll really dig this film. At the very least, I’m sure Mykko Myllylahti is flattered by the comparison, however uncomplimentary mean it to be.

Unrest (dir. Cyril Schaublin, Switzerland)

A much more compelling portrait of a small village and its people trapped in the thrall of frightening social powers is found in Unrest, perhaps the festival’s most explicitly political and radical drama. Anarchism as an ideology and social movement distinct from communism has had a less than fulsome exploration in cinema but as many of us look for alternative systems of social organization, its merits are well worth re-evaluating. Unrest examines the social organization of a small village in the Jura mountains in the 1870s, one whose whole economy has been structured around the growth of a productivity obsessed watchmaker, the villages chief employer.

Into this village comes real-life anarchist philosopher Pyotr Kropotkin, a Russian exile working with local anarchist collectives to form a modernized map of the area, one drawn up according to the priorities of practical local use. Through numerous eyes the film draws our attention to the injustices and absurdities of the current nationalist-capitalist system and the advantages of restructuring the community around the needs of the workers keeping it running, and not the proprietors who set the local schedule.

It’s a slow-burning film to be sure, with the conflict unfolding slowly as seismic shifts in communal perspective and allegiance, as characters make practical acts that reveal and provoke their ideological temperaments. The film lacks even a conventional score and is instead soundtracked by an exacting plenty of foley effects, as machinery whirs and ticks. Scenes in which we watch as the women of the factory assemble the watches—their smaller and more dexterous hands and lower requirements of salary making them the factory’s preferred employees—are wondrous in their intricacy, detail and strange incomprehensibility.

Much of the dynamism of Unrest is exhibited in the contrast of these extreme macro-shots with the exceptionally artful wide shots, playing with perspective and framing in a delightfully canny way, exploiting the local architecture of staircases and mezzanines to create new background frames that reinforce the foreground action at the bottom of the screen. Like the constant trickle created by the minute sounds of tweezers, gears, springs, bolts and sockets, these layered shots give off an acute atmosphere of almost magic realism that few period films are able to capture. The 1877 Switzerland created by Cyril Schaublin is one in which the pursuit of precision is rendered an absurdity by the ungovernable needs of human nature, relativity and error. When in their efforts to increase productivity, the supervisors time each worker as they complete their tasks, we see as the workers deliberately slow down so as to deceive their employees into giving them more time than they need.

The callous capitalist obsession with numbers is contrasted with the idealism of the collective, working efficiently to their mutual benefit. Through these characters, none could be called the lead, not even Kropotkin, the film absorbs a sense of humanistic warmth and tenderness. On paper, none of the characters here are any more detailed than those of The Woodcutter Story, but their situations and the subtle, credible performances of the actors make them poignant and investing. It’s a more realist and restrained piece, but there’s a lot of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists in this, presenting a manifesto of sorts for anarchism at its inception, and one that’s extremely persuasive.

Inland (Fridjof Ryder, UK)

Marking Mark Rylance’s second appearance at the festival (after his scene stealing turn as the inscrutable Sully in Bones and AllInland gives the actor an opportunity to give a very different, though little less impressive kind of performance, one harking back to the iconic role he debuted onstage in Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem. He plays “Dee”, an outwardly jocular but still deeply burdened car mechanic, and father to the true lead of Fridjof Ryder’s feature film debut, Rory Alexander.

Alexander’s character is given no name, but he is very much granted a past, although one the specifics of which we can only guess at. We first meet him as he is being granted release from what we can assume is a long stay at a psychiatric hospital, and he returns home to his dad, who gives him a job and a sofa to sleep on. His mum disappeared, how long ago, we have no clue, but Dee seems unconcerned, having long resigned himself to the belief that her disappearance was the result of another of her regular attacks of wanderlust, Romani and nature lover that she was. But his nameless son cannot let go of his mother. He tapes her photo to his car’s dashboard, but he needn’t have bothered since he sees her everywhere anyway.

Inland slowly (at least measured as a proportion of its short runtime) establishes itself first as an exploration of masculinity and insecurity, and thereafter of oedipal desire, grief, guilt, the sublime (and horrific) allure of the natural world and flat-out confusion. It is, in some measure, a kind of surrealist folk horror, with occasional moments of bizarre, nightmarish intensity. In one sequence, the young man is cajoled by his new co-workers into accompanying them to a brothel, where he sees the girls on offer as porcelain statues. Perhaps an absurdist piece of social commentary, perhaps an expression of deep-seated denial that one of those women was his mother.

However one interprets the uneven mixture of realist family drama and surreal folk horror that Inland‘s imagery suggests, the preoccupations of its mind are quite consistent. It manages to conjure up enough moments that one could describe as striking or potent with meaning, and the performances are uniformly strong, with Rory Alexander holding his own against the Oscar-winner who lent the film his credibility, but on the whole, it remains a slightly dissatisfying experience. We learn too little about our tragic antihero and though his discomfort with the macho role he’s expected to perform is often relatable, the film doesn’t manage to dig very deeply into it. One admires its ambition, but it doesn’t plant its roots in you the way it should.

Subtraction (dir. Mani Haghighi, Iran)

The idea of the doppelganger is a well-established trope in many traditions of storytelling. The idea of meeting someone who looks exactly like you is the cutting edge of one’s sense of self. It rests at the very limit of what we deem plausible, yet opens the door to a wealth of possibilities that can be frightening to comprehend. Films like Enemy or The Double ease that door open and step through, and Subtraction fits into that same category. All three of these films adopt a style and tone that is beyond a drama, but feels too grounded and character driven to call a thriller, isn’t sufficiently interested in the explanation of their own internal logic to be sci-fi, and feels too insidious and restrained to call horror. They are just doppelganger movies and have their own unique set of rules and preoccupations. We might therefore guess what feelings and ideas Subtraction will deal with: identity, jealousy, insecurity, guilt, grief, longing, anger, paranoia, but the unique ways in which Subtraction explores them give it an identity and allure all its own.

The film begins with Farzaneh (Tarane Alidousti), a driving instructor whose history of mental instability has been resurfacing as she’s unable to take her medications during pregnancy, and she and her husband Jalal (Navid Mohammdzade) are expecting their first child. In this state, she believes she sees Jalal enter another woman’s apartment, but when she confronts them, she makes a shocking and disturbing discovery.

It wouldn’t do to overinvest in the mechanics of the mystery behind what appears to be an eerie and impossible coincidence: how could she and her husband not only both have doubles, but what are the odds that those two doppelgangers should also be married to each other? We get a few hints that suggest something supernatural, even apocalyptic is taking place, with Tehran besieged by incessant rain and occasional other surrealist touches, but Subtraction does a very good job early on of establishing that this is not a mystery film. We aren’t interested in the ins and outs of who and why, what matters is how will our four leads each respond to the situation; what will it do to them as individuals, what will it do to their respective marriages, and how will it all end? The title suggests, not well.

At first, it’s easy to lose track of which character is which, adding to the film’s destabilizing effect, but it’s to the considerable credit of both leads, Mohammadzade and Alidousti that we soon grow to recognize each of their characters at a glance. Mohammadzade does a fantastic job playing both the gentle, accommodating Jalal and the violent-tempered Mohsen, while Alidousti has a perhaps even harder job to do playing the morose, fractured and insecure Farzaneh and the sensitive Bita, growing tired of her husband’s stubborn rage. The two have a genuine chemistry as Jalal and Bita find in one another an unexpected respite from their dysfunctional spouses and the characterization of all four is excellent, with the narrative taking turns that are shocking and surprising, but which feel almost inevitable in hindsight. It could almost make an intriguing double bill with Decision to Leave, another of the festival’s releases that mixes romance, chills and eventual tragedy.

It’s a haunting but accessible watch that takes you on what it ultimately a very dark, chilling journey through the shadowy halls of marriage and identity and its closest relative may be Enemy in that regard. It mightn’t be as attention grabbing as that film was, but in some ways, I might call Subtraction the less flawed film as a result. It doesn’t resort to surrealist abstractions to set the viewer on edge, instead it lets the characters and the chest-tightening scenario do that for it. It’s delicate, often sad and always exceptionally well crafted.

Written by Hal Kitchen

A graduate of the University of Kent, Reviews Editor Hal Kitchen joined Film Obsessive as a freelance writer in May 2020 following their postgraduate studies in Film with a specialization in Gender Theory and Studies. In November 2020 Hal assumed their role as Reviews Editor. Since then, Hal has written extensively for the site, writing analytical and critical pieces on film, and has represented the site at international film festivals including The London Film Festival and Panic Fest.

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