All weeklong I had been trying to figure how whether I should see The Burning Plain or Looking for Palladin which played opposite each other on Friday and Saturday.  I asked people who had gone to earlier screenings how well they had liked Plain or Palladin.  Reviews seemed to be a bit mixed on Palladin and while the Plain feedback was favorable no one was particularly ecstatic about it.   I tried to find out if one or the other were scheduled to come back for a regular theatrical run, but was stymied in getting that information.  The Burning Plain was a star-vehicle for Academy Award-winners Charlize Theron and Kim Basinger which might give it an advantage in being distributed over Looking for Palladin’s leads David Moscow and Ben Gazzara.   I could have seen both, but I would have had to sacrifice seeing Bonnie and Clyde.  It was a tough decision, but I really wanted to see the classic again.  So ultimately I had to choose and I decided to see The Burning Plain.  This film was written and directed by Guillermo Arriaga who is best known as a longtime collaborator of director Alejandro Iňárritu (Amores Perros, 21 Grams, Babel) and this film was his feature film directing debut.  Arriaga and Iňárritu had developed a series of triptych films in which three seemingly unrelated stories unfold only to ultimately be revealed as being linked together.  This format can be disorienting and requires the audience to be willing to be patient for pieces of the puzzle to be revealed and to be willing to work to put the puzzle pieces together.  The disconnected distribution of information can also provide a mask for imperfections of the narrative.  This film begins much the same way as Arriaga’s Iňárritu collaborations except this isn’t another exercise in how lives intersect in unexpected ways as much as Arriaga reveals a single story through different strands separated by time and space.  The film is a meditation on love, loyalty, guilt, and family bonds.  This engaging film has solid ensemble acting throughout and several compelling characters especially on the distaff side: young Maria (Tessa Ia), teenaged Mariana (Jennifer Lawrence), the troubled Sylvia (Theron), and the wounded and guilty adulteress Gina (Basinger).  Though the men do function primarily as foils for the female characters, Arriaga does give opportunities to actors to invest their characters with humanity.  The characters who best take advantage of that opportunity are Gina’s lover Nick (Joaquim de Almeida) and teenaged Santiago (J. D. Pardo).  Although the characters do grab the audience and the film develops a narrative momentum that hauls the audience along, the film reminds me of Jim Croce’s song “Bad Bad Leroy Brown.”  Leroy, as you may recall, had become interested in the wife of a jealous man and when the ensuing knife fight was over “Leroy looked like a jigsaw puzzle with a couple of pieces gone.”  That’s how I feel about this film because there are some aspects of the story that don’t quite feel right.  There are family connections from the earlier part of the story that are totally absent from the later half.  Theron’s Sylvia lives a widely dichotomous life marked by ultra-competence as an upscale restauranteur and personal disarray featuring the obsessive pursuit of joyless sex.  Most distressing to me is that the key relationship that ties the two parts of the story together had seemed merely unlikely due to its context in the story as presented, but becomes almost totally inexplicable once one knows the whole story.  Arriaga definitely traverses territory that has been scorched very dark indeed.  Still many other festival-goers professed to be fully enthralled by the film’s story and seemed untroubled by the credibility steeplechase course placed before the film viewer.  This is an intriguing, though not fully satisfying film that I am looking forward to seeing again.

Cédric Klapisch’s Paris is an interesting follow-up to a Guillermo Arriaga film because this film seemingly borrows from Arriaga and Iňárritu by using their narrative technique of showing how the lives of many different people in Paris intersect in unexpected ways.  The central story is about a dancer named Pierre (Romain Duris) who develops an unnamed cardiac condition for which the only chance of cure is to perform a heart transplant.  While he waits to move up the waiting list for his operation, he turns to his sister Élise (Juliette Binoche) for support—expressly refusing to tell their parents about his serious health condition—and ends up living with Élise and her children.  Holed up in their apartment, Pierre begins observing the world—and especially the people—around them.  This is a starting point and recurring touchstone for the film.  The film skips off to follow other characters and their predicaments.  The film is preoccupied with how they connect and how they don’t.  The distinction between what writer-director Klapisch has done and the films of Arriaga and Iňárritu is the tone they take.  While Arriaga and Iňárritu tell tragic stories suffused with melancholy and a sense of impending doom, Klapisch embeds his tragedies in an optimistic comic sensibility that is both wry and occasionally ridiculous.  The result is that Klapisch observes the fragility and disarray of life as an urgent plea to be open to others and to seek joy in life as opposed to showing how one individual’s misstep can be linked to several others in a cascade of ill-fortune as if one should be constantly wary of how whatever one does may contribute to some disaster large or small.  The ensemble acting is terrific and the characters make you want their lives to be better and you root for the lonely to connect with each other.  The film has a delightful rhythm that may defy what we know about how life works, but most filmgoers will be entranced and want to dance the dance that Klapisch has choreographed.             

Georg Koszulinski led a workshop during MIFF on “No Budget Filmmaking” so it should come as no surprise that his Dead Buffalo is a no budget or, perhaps more likely, a microbudget film.  This is definitely not to say that budget size is the determinant factor in whether a film works, but solid production values can hide a multitude of  cinematic “sins” that are all-too-naked to the observer of a less well-endowed production.  Dead Buffalo is a road trip film from the subgenre of valedictory road trips.  Charlie Johnson (Shamrock McShane) is dying of an unspecified illness and wants his son Dusty (Drew Blair) to drive him somewhere.  This will be their final trip together.  These films have a destination that ostensibly is a special someplace, but in actuality it is a place of healing for all the wounds—real and imagined—inflicted by a lifetime of slings and arrows.  I saw a terrific example of this type of film last year in Toronto called $5 a Day with Christopher Walken and Alessandro Nivola as an estranged father and son.  Unfortunately, Walken and Nivola are not the actors and Koszulinski is working from his own script not one written by $5 a Day’s Neal and Tippi Dobrofsky.    The purported reason for the road trip is to somehow save the buffalo by going to the western plains and connecting with the spirit of Black Elk.  If the family had some Native American background no matter how diluted and otherwise denied by a conventional American lifestyle, it might resonate as poignant. In that this seems totally outside of the life experience of this white east coast family makes it somewhat ridiculous.  Although there could be comic value mined from this discordant destination, this is played absolutely straight without any sort of wink-wink-nudge-nudge to the audience on the part of the father that might have quickly established an intimacy, a rapport with the audience.  The film has rants.  Father and son share sharp exchanges.  There’s a side trip to visit Uncle Bob (Scot Davis), but the dialogue is unfocused and somewhat repetitive making the revelation that this scene was ad libbed unsurprising.  Eventually, the dying father and his son, the reluctant chauffeur, start to come to terms with each other.  However, none of it works.  There is hardly a line of dialogue that rings true.   This is probably being a little harsh, but the effect of having dialogue that frequently misses is that the lines that might have worked become tainted by the ones that don’t.  Everything else that might have better served the story becomes undone by the failure of the dialogue to carry the story.  This is a well-intentioned film that addresses one of those very difficult parts of life: the endgame.  Unfortunately, the execution is lacking to make this the kind of thoughtful and poignant film that was intended.         

War Against the Weak is a meticulously detailed history lesson and a very powerful indictment of eugenics.  Eugenics is a term we don’t hear very often so it is probably helpful to describe it.  The breezy description for eugenics might be better living through better breeding since eugenicists tilt heavily towards nature (genetics) in nature vs. nurture debates.  Eugenics is a deliberate attempt to help nature by encouraging reproduction designed to enhance the outcomes for desirable characteristics.  Eugenicists hope to make selections that will improve species faster than the natural selection of adaptive characteristics outlined by Charles Darwin through evolution.  Selective breeding has been well-established in the genetic manipulation of plants and animals.  So why did this story of industrialists, scientists, and social reformers embracing this process to improve humanity hit me like a ton of bricks?  The film carries the tagline:  “It began in America. It ended in Germany.”  It was indeed startling to see noted and respected American business leaders, social reformers, and scientists from the early 20^th century as well as research studies cited in countless college textbooks implicated in the increasingly sinister story of eugenics.  It was unsettling to learn that the imprisoned Hitler was reading about the theories and practices of American eugenicists when he wasn’t writing his book Mein Kampf.   There were direct links between the eugenics researchers in the United States and those who sprang up in Germany at the Nazi’s behest.  Eugenics was not just about advancing the outcomes for reproducing desirable characteristics, it was also about trying to reduce or eliminate undesirable characteristics.   In the United States, there were systematic programs developed in many states to catalogue defects thought to be transmitted genetically and the so-called feeble-minded were targeted for sterilization.  The Supreme Court decision rejecting a legal challenge to these sterilization programs was written by the noted jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes.  In Nazi Germany there was the Holocaust that devastated European Jewry, but there were also systematic efforts to round up and eliminate other groups of people felt to be racially inferior (Gypsies), morally degenerate (homosexuals), aged, disabled, and the feeble-minded.  The concepts of eugenics were implemented using the full power of the state to further horrific ends consistent with their logical conclusions.  The film is quite thorough in describing the enormity of what the Nazis did in the name of eugenics definitely running the risk of overwhelming the audience into “psychic numbing” as described in the film Reporter.   As the film catalogs the sickening offenses of Dr. Joseph Mengele who conducted savage experiments on concentration camp prisoners, one begins to question whether one really needs to rehash the Nazi period this way.  However, this is an important film with far-reaching contemporary moral implications as it touches on issues with which we continue to wrestle: population control, euthanasia, assisted suicide, capital punishment, reproductive freedom, contraception, adoption, abortion, racism, xenophobia, civil rights, ethnic rivalry, and genocide.  What was most disturbing about the film was looking at the decision process determining what characteristics and which groups of people were seen as desirable and what and who were devalued as undesirable.  Though the eugenicists presented themselves as rationally and benevolently applying science, they selected targets based on personal or cultural biases and the perceived weakness in the prospective target being able to defend itself.   Who and what was perceived as desirable and undesirable was based on who was making the decision.  Though Justin Strawhand ends his film in 1945 with eugenics thrown into disrepute, he did indicate in the Q & A after the film that he intends to make another film to bring the story of eugenics up to the present day.  Capricious forces that hold some lives dear while others are devalued, discarded, and even destroyed continue to operate in this world.  With direct genetic manipulation hovering ever closer to our all-too-human grasp it is helpful to see how this type of work—however well-intentioned—can lead to unspeakable horrors if not subject to careful and thorough ethical evaluation. The film is rich with considerable details about individual lives.  The filmmakers have worked hard combing for useful images.  The film is well-illustrated with lots of archival motion picture and still photos.  This is a powerful and masterful piece of filmmaking.