Selections from the 2023 Montclair Film Festival

Evil Does Not Exist ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

A quiet, simple, beautiful movie, at least at first. A small village in a remote land of woods and lakes. A small population living with nature, getting their  water from the stream that flows through their land, their heat from the firewood they chop.

So where does the question of evil pop up? A Tokyo company buys land in this village and plans to build a glamping site, seeking to turn the area into a tourist attraction. Greed, pollution, profiteering and insensitivity are now introduced into the story.

Two people, a man and a woman, who work for a talent agency, are hired by the developer to be the liaison with the locals. They don’t connect. They don’t connect with their employers either, nor with each other. They are in fact little connected with the life they lead and the choices they’ve made.

Maybe that reminds you of another Japanese movie, Drive My Car. The director is the same, Ryusuke Hamaguchi. If you saw Drive My Car you’ll recognize the pacing. Deliberate. Evil Does Not Exist is much shorter than Drive My Car. I think most of the audience would have wanted it to go a bit longer.

That’s because the ending is all ambiguity. We don’t find out why things happened the way they did, nor are we even sure what exactly happened. If you like to have all the loose ends tied up before a movie ends, this one may not be for you. I found it crazy captivating.

‘Evil Does Not Exist’: first trailer for Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Venice award-winner

Fallen Leaves ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Holappa is a construction worker who gets fired from one job after another for drinking on the job. Ansa gets canned from her job stacking grocery store shelves when she gets caught pinching a packet of something that had an old expiration date and was ticketed for the dumpster. She loses her next job when the owner of the pub where she’s washing dishes get hauled away for dealing drugs .

They first encounter each other in a dive karaoke bar where his friend tries to hit on her friend (and gets dissed). They go on a date, to a zombie movie, then she gives him her number. He folds up the paper, puts it in his pocket and two minutes later when he pulls out his cigarette packet the folded paper goes flying out into the gutter.

The settings for this Finnish movie are grim and somber. There’s alcoholics’ bars and job sites where the work is hard and the treatment harsh. There’s small, sparse bunkers where the workers live and dark, deserted streets.

This is a movie of the common man. Average looking folks who lead hard lives, have little money and no hope for the future. The faces of the people in the bars and the stores look as though the life has been beaten out of them, most blankly staring straight ahead. And for Holappa and Ansa, there’s the loneliness as well.

The lost phone number is only the first in a series of obstacles that keeps these two from getting together. But ultimately in this world where the slightest of smiles has outsized meaning, this is a heart-warming love story. And, despite all the grimness,  it’s told with a hearty dose of humor.

Fallen Leaves (2023) | Trailer | Aki Kaurismäki Alma Pöysti | Jussi Vatanen

Wilding ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

If you want to see a feel good movie, go for the one with the animals.

Wilding is about a re-wilding project in the south of England. It is mostly narrated by Isabella Tree, author of the “The Book of Wilding” on which the documentary is based. Her husband Charlie inherited a farm only to find that the land had undergone year after year of plowing, insecticides and fertilizer to the point that the soil was farmed out. Based on a project they’d visited in Holland, they decided to undertake a project to restore the land to its natural state.

Where to start? The animals. They bring in horses, cows and pigs and turn them loose. They live not as farm animals but back in their natural state, running free and finding their food and means of survival. What took years and years happens in 90 minutes when you’re watching this movie. What you see is the land come to life. Birds arrive, so do butterflies and worms and mice. There are some landmark moments. Two storks produce a baby for the first time in England in 400 years. And they bring in beavers, animals that had been hunted to extinction in England.

Of course the stars of the show are the animals. It is fascinating to see how these animals easily transformed to a wild existence. We get to see why they do things like digging and nosing through mud. My favorite are the pigs. I could watch them all day.

There is a serious environmental message here. What have we done to the earth’s skin, the soil, and where do we go from here. Re-wilding has apparently become a bit of a thing. It’s not a fast solution, as the 15 years of pictures in this documentary will attest.

Anselm ⭐️⭐️⭐️

When I saw in the program a 3D movie by Wim Wenders about the artist Anselm Kiefer, my first thought was that this is the kind of movie you make after you’ve done everything else in cinema. Turns out that this is not Wenders first 3D movie and that he is a master at it. This is not the Disney fantastical sort of 3D viewed through paper “glasses” with colored cellophane. This is a hyper-realistic 3D viewed through battery-operated viewers that the festival organizers assured are expensive. And when the subject is an artist who does installations, sculptures and 3D paintings, two-dimensional flat screen pictures would pale by comparison.

We see Kiefer at work in old warehouses and factories where he took space in Germany and later France. At work for Kiefer involves burning, melting, pouring, splattering. There’s a series of headless white dresses with objects on top, numerous ruined landscapes and massive murals, damaged airplanes and bicycles. A theme in his work is recognizing Germany’s Nazi past, a statement aimed at a society that wants to forget.

There are some biographical scenes as well with actors playing a younger Kiefer and the artist as a child. There is little narrative. But there is poetry.

This is more a gallery experience than a cinema one. The attraction of the film is the wonder of Wender’s 3D. A great artist plying his trade by documenting another great artist.

Anselm – Official US Trailer

Rule of Two Walls ⭐️⭐️

A documentary about artists in wartime Ukraine. Sometimes you see people trying to live normal lives in abnormal times. Other times you see the devastation. And be forewarned there are some gruesome images of bodies dead and dismembered by Russian bombs. There is no getting away from what’s happening in Ukraine.

The movie is centered in Lviv in a community arts center. There are musicians, visual artists, cinematographers. They tell their stories. Some came to Lviv from harder hit areas like Mariupol or Kharkiv. Some stayed as their families left, some stayed because their families couldn’t leave. Sometimes the distinction between who is in the movie and who is making the movie is blurry.

The “rule of two walls” apparently is an expression that suggests the safest place is the corridor (as opposed to say the bomb shelter).

Putin wants you to think Ukraine is not a nation with a language and a culture. These artists are the embodiment of that culture. And that, folks, is the moral of this story.

If I were to use one word to describe this film it would be uneven. Not sure the translation didn’t leave something to be desired. There were times I felt that I was listening to smart people say profound things, but the words that came up in the subtitles didn’t match those expectations. In the end I don’t feel I got to know these people or their art.

rule of two walls trailer 1080p