We were always going to see the new Jafar Panahi film. After Taxi Tehran and No Bears, you can sign me up for any new film from Panahi. And more broadly, all of the Iranian cinema we’ve seen at the film festival has been gold.
This, fresh from winning the top prize at Cannes, is no different. It’s a fairly simple premise: what do you do if given the chance to take revenge on your torturer? And the story doesn’t do anything massively unexpected. But Panahi’s films are about the characters and they’re all just so human.
Life in 1970s rural Brazil does not look fun. We join Iracema, an anagram of America, in her precarious existence on the edge of the transamazonian highway. There are moments of joy - markets, festivals, bars - but there is a lot of very hard, grim survival too. Men are awful - aggressive, predatory, violent. The women aren’t much better. Somehow Iracema scrapes by, sleeping with truck drivers for lifts, bartering for cigarettes and booze.
Meanwhile, the amazon burns in the name of progress.
Brendan Fraser is a down-on-his-luck actor living in Tokyo, when he stumbles upon the Rental Family agency. Soon he’s moved on from being an anonymous mourner at funerals to being fake family, partners and friends.
It’s a surprisingly heartfelt little story.
My first dud of this year’s festival.
The premise is interesting enough - Jessica Chastain is a high-powered American, all business-suits and chauffeured cars, who has taken a younger Mexican lover from the ballet academy she sponsors. Suddenly, he’s no longer a bit on the side in Mexico but has smuggled himself into the US and inserted himself into her life.
Unfortunately, I never really liked any of the characters. At some point I found myself wondering why I was watching a small story of unpleasant people being unpleasant to each other.
Documentaries are always hard to comment on really. Are you appreciating the film? Or just agreeing with the points the film made?
In Symbiosis is pretty much as right-on as it comes. We cover GM crops, pesticides, insect death, industrial fertilizers, the world bank’s debt strategy, colonial famine, soil structure, happy cows and more.
If that sounds like a lot… it is. It definitely tries to be holistic in its approach but for me that just meant it covered too many things too quickly. It was also noticeably short on answers. We had lots of stats about how bad things were but very few about how to fix it. It’s all very well some cheerful organic farmers explaining their processes but how will it feed all the people?
Interesting, thought provoking, but ultimately a little short on ideas.