Film
This year’s Melbourne International Film Festival featured some great films – including a stunning retrospective of Chantal Akerman – but where was the risk? By Christos Tsiolkas.
MIFF’s safe offerings a sign of timid times
Over the past few weeks, on my way into town for the Melbourne International Film Festival, I have been listening to Screen Drafts, an unashamedly geeky podcast that ranks actors, filmmakers, film genres and film tropes. Though I am suspicious of grading film by numbers, there’s no denying the exuberance of the conversations. The guests are knowledgeable and always up for good-natured argument and debate.
Its freewheeling energy is very American, as is the tendency for some of the participants to prioritise moralism over aesthetics in their discussions – I can’t help thinking that in some circles the idea of “subverting the canon” has become as moribund as the notion of the “canon” itself. But the podcasters’ rapturous enjoyment of film and their willingness to explore both mainstream film and genres at the very fringes of cinema means I am constantly reminded of films I need to return to or directed towards films that have slipped under my radar.
A recent podcast was devoted to films that were “booed at Cannes”. I’d recommend that episode just to hear the subtle, sophisticated defence of Gaspar Noé’s 2002 film Irreversible. Considering how audiences at festivals can be so deeply divided by film, I wished some of this contentiousness was at play at MIFF. I saw some striking films at the festival this year, and I saw a batch of solid films, but there wasn’t one I came out of that led to animated, spirited debate.
There was careful curation in the program and a commendable effort to screen films from across the globe. First- and second-time film directors were represented in the Bright Horizons section, a programming strand that ensures the focus isn’t always on the more established directors. Yet even in that section, the films felt safe, tentative.
That timidity may not be the fault of the programmers. Even when dealing with provocative themes, the filmmaking on offer was often drearily conventional. It’s not that I think a filmmaker’s uncertainty or cautious speculation is a problem: often scepticism and hesitation generate more fascinating films. There were few filmmakers, though, who seemed interested in integrating speculation into their formal choices. In the Bright Horizons section, the exception was Colombian director Simón Mesa Soto’s A Poet. Soto conveyed the subjective extremities of hubris and paranoia as they affect an artist in crisis while always purposefully keeping the audience centred on the human cost.
More powerfully, doubt and mistrust were core concerns and filmmaking strategies in Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident. The dissident filmmaker had to film his surreal tale covertly, as the Iranian authorities refused him the right to work. The story is about the kidnapping of a man who might or might not be a torturer. The film masterfully balances scenes of biting comic satire with deeply felt denunciations of the violations and horrors enacted by the Iranian police state.
It doesn’t have the singular vision and purity of Panahi’s most powerful work, such as Crimson Gold (2003) or This Is Not a Film (2011). Here he is mostly effective in fusing together an almost slapstick comic tone with austere shots and framing that consciously reference Samuel Beckett’s plays. The long showdown between torturer and victim is overwritten and I wasn’t convinced in this particular scene by its blend of staginess and cinematic realism. Even so, the chilling final scene – a perfect distillation of the film’s themes in the powerful juxtaposition between a nearly static image and diegetic sound – proves Panahi as one of the central artists of contemporary world cinema.
I saw one great work at MIFF this year – Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). I have only seen it previously on a very damaged 16mm print, so it was a joy to watch it in the intricate art deco beauty of Melbourne’s Capitol theatre.
Delphine Seyrig plays the eponymous title character, a widow and mother who is also a part-time sex worker. Taking place over three days in scenes that consciously emulate real time, we watch Jeanne cleaning, shopping, cooking, reading. Though the formal techniques are arguably borrowed from documentary, I think this film is possibly the very antithesis of documentary: realism is employed to enhance the specificity of the director’s vision. The artistic strategies are not so very different from those that inform the French nouveau roman of the 1950s and ’60s, but what quickly becomes tedious in prose can be hypnotic on the screen. The image continues to captivate us: we focus in on the hemline of a dress, the shifting of a face into a frown.
It’s a great work, but it isn’t faultless. There’s a condescension in the concept that I have always resisted, in particular the making of Jeanne as a petit bourgeois rather than a working-class woman. It allows Akerman to be coolly dismissive of Jeanne’s circumstances and world. There’s a moment when Jeanne is scrubbing a bath when I thought to myself, I don’t think Seyrig has cleaned a bathroom in her life. And if the film’s determined, uncompromising realism has been a clear inspiration across the globe, its ending has had a less benign influence. The film lurches into a violent denouement that I have always thought unearnt: I think Jeanne Dielman is smarter and less a victim than the director and actor think she is. That abrupt and incongruous shock ending is a device replicated in countless French films over the ensuing decades. I can’t think of one in which it works.
The Akerman retrospective, Traces, is an example of what a film festival can do best. The films were curated by Kate Jinx, and I was lucky to hear her speak about her love of Akerman’s films. The filmmaker’s attentiveness throughout her career in interrogating realism in both her fiction and her documentary work became a guiding principle in Jinx’s curation of the features and short films that were part of the retrospective.
This coherent and enthusiastic framework when it comes to putting together a program stands out for me because it felt lacking in the rest of the festival. The slotting of films into geographical territories might be convenient, but it doesn’t indicate what is specifically exciting about a particular national cinema at this current moment.
I do understand: it’s getting harder for festivals to compete for films, particularly now that cinema chains are hosting “national” festivals of their own. Probably the most outstanding contemporary film I saw over the length of the festival was Joachim Trier’s beautiful, elegant and film-literate Sentimental Value. Except that it wasn’t part of MIFF: it was screening in the Scandinavian Film Festival. The art-house audience is loyal – that’s clear in the large queues and sellout sessions that are part of MIFF – but it is also an audience that knows increasingly it can get its film offerings elsewhere.
One of the more startling and exciting films at MIFF this year was Oliver Laxe’s Sirāt, a techno homage to both Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear (1953) and William Friedkin’s 1977 film, Sorcerer (which was itself a remake of the Clouzot original). Music is central to how the film achieves its effects: the build-up, repetitions and euphoric drops of trance are part of the very structure of the film’s storytelling. Though Laxe isn’t consistent in this approach, and though it became clear he didn’t know how to end his film, I responded to his audacity.
Maybe the categories of geography and genre that now dominate film festival programming have become so neat that they lack imagination. The music documentaries at the festival this year had interesting subjects but formally were sincere, conventional portraits of an artist or a scene. They didn’t excite as film. Maybe I have been listening to too many Screen Drafts episodes, but I wondered what a “techno” program would look like: not one about only the music genre itself but that also highlighted fiction and experimental films that use techno music as a filmic strategy and inspiration. Maybe it’s a bad idea, worthy of being booed. Or maybe it’s a risk worth taking.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on August 27, 2025 as "Safe space".
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