lacqueredmouse

Liberally taking stories from Ovid's epic poem that bears its name, Metamorphoses is a rich and variegated sequence of interconnecting stories, telling of Gods and men, the women they seduce, and their impact in the heavens and on earth.

And it's a pretty fine spectacle. We see Europa (Amira Akili) stolen from the human world by Jupiter (Sébastien Hirel) while Bacchus (Damien Chapelle) cavorts with women and men and animals. There's the unknowable purposes of the Gods at play, we see, juxtaposed against the very real human traits of desire and lust.

It is a fairly explicit film. I feel like a good proportion of screen time has one character or another (and often many) naked or in some state of undress, and there are numerous rather lascivious close ups of genitalia in particular. It all adds to the salacious tone of the film, of course, and further promulgates the films intentions.

As a result, there is indeed something thrillingly exciting and a little titillating about the film even as one is searching for its artistic merit. It's not pornographic by any means, but it does seek to illustrate desire in a way that speaks to the audience kinetically.

In this way, it's actually rather successful, even if it does stand to be a little perplexing. I think if I were to see this film in complete isolation, I'd likely be more harsh on it, but at a film festival, it was a fine piece of programming, and a good entry in a rich selection of films.

The premise of this film sounded so interesting: author Michel Houellebecq plays himself, and attempts to explain a period in 2011 when he went missing for several days, by creating a fictionalised kidnapping. The premise is amusingly twisted, and I was intrigued to see what they'd do with it.

Unfortunately, what they do with it is incredibly banal. Houellebecq gets kidnapped, is rather tame and pleasant to his captors, who are tame and pleasant in return, and then it's over.

It's meant to be a comedy, I suppose. There's something very surreal about the whole thing, quite apart from the conceit of the film. Every scene is so humdrum that it clashes against the situation the author is in. Houellebecq is calm to the point of boredom, as though it's every day he gets held to ransom. We follow pointless conversations about H. P. Lovecraft's saliva-soaked pillow and whether or not the author can have a lighter for his cigarettes please. One slightly interesting sequence involves his captors teaching Houellebecq some MMA techniques to stave off their own boredom, but it's only a pale glow in an otherwise grey fog.

Boredom is the watchword of this film, and as much as it tries to extract humour from just how mundane it is, it just ends up being incredibly tedious to watch. In addition, at a level above merely watching it, there's something superficially narcissistic about Houellebecq's portrayal of himself—I know that as an author he's supposed to be controversial, but I didn't really care enough about the film to really get engaged—at an academic level I thought it was incredibly shallow.

So this ended up one of those films that I hated through boredom rather than through the type of active hatred that can often be the result of something truly provocative. It was most of all a pointless film, and one that I'm afraid to say I wish I'd not bothered seeing.

I saw this film recently at the Sydney Film Festival, and admittedly had fairly neutral expectations for it beforehand. But this is a really wonderful film that must presage a bright future ahead for Australian cinema.

Fell is the debut feature from director Kasimir Burgess, and he shows a wonderful craft in his first film. The story is simple enough. Thomas (Matt Nable) is camping with his young daughter when she is tragically killed in a hit-and-run accident with a logging truck. The driver, Luke (Daniel Henshall), is sent to prison for it. Fast-forward five years and a shattered Thomas has left his city life to settle in the town where the accident took place, and begins working as a logger. It appears he's waiting for the moment when Luke is released from prison, and returns.

It's a really quite stunning film in many ways. The cinematography is truly excellent, and captures the depth and beauty of the Australian bush. The performances are restrained but extremely powerful, in particular Matt Nable as Thomas, whose pain is palpable even through such a taciturn character.

So many of the pieces of the production add to the atmosphere. The sound design is wonderful, with the score evoking the calls of birds in the bush against the hum of chainsaws. Editing is done to allow long, languid shots of the environment while we the audience muse on some piece of emotional turmoil in the story.

It really was a truly wonderful film, especially when taken as a complete package. I was incredibly moved by it by the end, and the journey it took me on was sublime. I await Burgess's next feature with anticipation.