Discoveries and Rediscoveries at the 66th Thessaloniki International Film Festival
This year’s edition of the Thessaloniki Film Festival, as I experienced it, revolved around one central theme: family. From the opening film – Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother (winner of the Golden Lion in Venice) – to the retrospective dedicated to the writer-director duo Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, whose work is, to put it mildly, not exactly family-friendly.
I’ll write about Venice’s big winner closer to its Romanian release on December 26. As for the Belgian pair’s inventive combinatorics – an idiosyncratic mix of David Lynch and Magritte influences, giallo cinema, and BDSM aesthetics (lots of skin and leather), with a soundscape oscillating between ASMR (again, skin and leather) and its complete opposite – that deserves a longer piece (and several rewatches). Their filmography, where words are minimal, could well serve as an audiovisual handbook on storytelling.
Until those future texts, here are three films centred on families in various stages of disintegration: Follies, an unpretentious Canadian comedy that won me over from the very first scene, and two American indie films featuring British Isles talent that left me with mixed feelings – Hamnet and The Mastermind.
BDSM at Home: Follies
Follies (Folichonneries) is a Canadian debut written and directed by Éric K. Boulianne, about a couple determined to break the monotony of domestic monogamy and open their marriage to all sorts of new experiences – including explaining to their young children that mommy and daddy are now in an open relationship. It’s a half-hearted recommendation, even though it was my favourite film of this year’s Thessaloniki IFF, simply because it’s unlikely to become widely available to global audiences anytime soon – which is a shame, since it would be a safe bet even for a market like Romania.
My favourite from last year’s edition (which I also skipped writing about for the same reasons) was another Canadian comedy, Universal Language – a film of entirely different artistic ambitions, an improbable fusion of the themes, sensibilities, and styles of two filmmakers as different as Guy Maddin and Abbas Kiarostami. That one somehow found its way to mainstream streaming platforms, helped by a brilliant festival run (which also landed it as Canada’s Oscar submission). Follies might also have a shot at streaming success, though along a different path – via domestic box-office popularity. Boulianne, a first-time director, is otherwise a prolific screenwriter: two of his comedies topped Canada’s box-office charts in their release years. He also plays one of the two leads here (complete with the requisite nipple clamps), alongside Catherine Chabot, who plays the other half of this rom-com with a kink.
Their marital dynamic – funny without ever tipping into cringe (not even when the father takes his daughters to the playground while wearing a few BDSM gadgets under his clothes) – is the main reason Follies feels so light and effortlessly enjoyable, a broad-audience comedy that still couldn’t make it into theatres without an IM-18 rating.
Deadbeat Dads
Thessaloniki also gave me the chance to catch up, on the big screen, with two festival sensations. Both are period films – set in Elizabethan England and 1970s America – that, in their own distinct ways, explore the figure of the deadbeat dad (again, the family theme), and both are directed by two of today’s most in-demand female filmmakers: Hamnet (dir. Chloé Zhao) and The Mastermind (dir. Kelly Reichardt).
The first is, on the surface, a sort of origin story for William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal), showing his shift from comedies to tragedies after a family tragedy (the death of his son, Hamnet). The Mastermind is an (anti-)heist movie starring Josh O’Connor as a father on the run, pursued by the law, who abandons his wife and sons, and for whom both lives, the family man and the fugitive, seem equally meaningless.
Even without the family connection, I had planned to write about these two films together, starting from their leads – two of the most coveted English-speaking (but non-American) actors, who’ve recently broken into the ranks of big-budget, Oscar-courting Hollywood, yet still keep one foot in the so-called indie scene (they also co-starred this year in The History of Sound, which premiered at Cannes).
Both films – and their lead performances – caught my attention, but also managed to lose it along the way: The Mastermind irreversibly so, after a flawless first act. There’s nothing to fault in O’Connor’s performance, though his character isn’t memorable – and even if that blankness is intentional, by design, it doesn’t make the film any less tedious. Hamnet, more uneven, occasionally recovers and manages an honourable ending – largely thanks to Jessie Buckley, who steals the spotlight from Paul Mescal.
Hamnet – Jessie Buckley’s Tempest
In the case of Hamnet, I’ll admit I fell for the bait: how can there be a film about Shakespeare’s son that isn’t about Shakespeare himself? The bait – or narrative gimmick, let’s say – was there from the start, in the source material: Maggie O’Farrell’s novel (who also co-wrote the script with Chloé Zhao). Because it is, in fact, Shakespeare’s story – Agnes Shakespeare’s story (Jessie Buckley), that is: the artist’s wife, often left alone while he’s in London or on tour, who must face the death of their son Hamnet by herself.
Ultimately, it’s a film about a mother losing a child. So then, “what’s in a name?”, to quote the Bard ironically: the cynical answer would be marketing; an equally valid one – a circular demonstration of how we write and digest the history of great male cultural figures. Would the novel have been as successful (or even written or adapted in the first place) without those two mighty names attached – the most celebrated playwright in history and his most famous character?
That’s not to say the novel or the film make any kind of explicit feminist critique (at most, an implicit one), or attempt to re-evaluate Shakespeare the man. Hamnet did indeed die at eleven while his father was away on tour – the rest is pure speculation, historical fiction, and knowingly so. Hamnet is about the two of them – William and Agnes – and their very different aspirations: he, an aspiring playwright suffering from writer’s block, crushed under the heel of an abusive father who forces him into manual labor rather than letting him write; she, a sort of druid-hippie, in touch with nature and allergic to churchgoing, yet far more pragmatic when it comes to raising children, who gives him her blessing to leave for London and be a genius.
Paul Mescal, whimpering in candlelight with a quill in hand, unable to articulate what he feels, seems more like a directorial choice than a slip-up – or at least another sign that Will/Mescal is there mostly for show and marketing purposes, since the true focus is Agnes/Jessie Buckley.
I doubt Shakespeare himself could have written a better part for a grieving mother – though he might have been horrified by Buckley’s performance, which comes from somewhere far deeper, a torrent of pain that words can’t contain (as primal as the ancestral forest of Stratford-upon-Avon where her character wanders, which Zhao captures with poetic precision). Meanwhile, the father drifts further from the family, abandoning his wife and remaining children, unable to move past his trauma. Hence the (tenuous) connection with Hamlet, which Shakespeare’s biographers have been drawing for centuries.
Shot with the sensitivity you’d expect from a humanist filmmaker like Zhao, Maggie O’Farrell’s imagined hermeneutics gain a certain resonance – though it still requires a fair amount of goodwill from the viewer (“piece out our imperfections with your thoughts,” as the Bard himself would say).
Reunited at the premiere of Hamlet, the two spouses share a cathartic moment: she understands that his boundless grief has been sublimated into this play, which the film invites us to read in a rather convoluted way – Shakespeare/Mescal plays the ghost of the murdered king, as if to converse with his son (Hamlet/Hamnet), a symbolic role reversal, a sacrifice of imagination.
Watching how this scene is constructed – with a Hamlet who’s clearly miscast and poorly played, yet not so poorly as to ruin the emotional charge radiating from the lead actress – I can’t help but wonder again: is this really “the best they could do,” or an intentional statement from Zhao, a kind of self-sabotage meant to heighten the contrast between two ways of living, feeling, and enduring life – of letting life pass through you versus wrapping yourself in thoughts, rhymes, figures of speech, masks?
Either way, the earlier moment with Mescal reciting the famous soliloquy in tortured fashion under the moonlight, by the Thames, definitely belongs in the “not to be” category.
The Mastermind – Like a Rolling Stone
On the other side, Josh O’Connor fares a little better in The Mastermind, delivering a restrained portrait of a young man caught somewhere between artist, father, and art thief – torn between ambition and apathy. The nickname “The Mastermind,” as one of his accomplices calls him when questioned by police (to the protagonist’s amusement), belongs to J.B. Mooney: a judge’s son, a mama’s boy (it’s her money that funds his schemes), and an art school dropout. Within his own family, J.B. is an absent husband and father – that’s when he’s not actively putting his kids in danger, letting them roam the city with money for junk food, or taking them along to clandestine meetings where he ends up getting kidnapped.
In essence, J.B. is like the tumbleweed rolling in the background of a Western – and Kelly Reichardt keeps her camera trained on him, even though all he seems to want is to be left alone, to drift aimlessly through life… like a rolling stone. (With his cap, his shivers, and his hangdog stare, he could easily be the cover of a Bob Dylan album.)
Not that this antihero has anything to do with the counterculture or campus protests against the Vietnam War (playing in the background on TV screens), but he certainly doesn’t aspire to be a respectable pillar of the community either – or even of his own family. And yet something drives him to meticulously plan and execute a perfectly timed art heist: four modernist paintings from the local museum, where he also happens to sit on the board.
His motivations remain opaque, his mind ultimately a mystery – though, in hindsight, it’s easy to imagine that J.B. may have plotted the whole thing just to have an excuse to run away from home if the heist failed. Which, of course, it does – though not quite through his fault. Somehow, despite a series of comical obstacles, everything falls into place: the plan works, but the mastermind becomes the victim of his own crew.
Reichardt, who also wrote the screenplay, draws the moral with elegant precision, closing the loop neatly: a man so indecisive, so unreadable, attracts equally unreliable accomplices. The driver bails on him, one of the thieves gets arrested for another job and spills to the cops, and the third betrays him to the mob, who steal the paintings.
Suspected by the police and left without his prize, J.B. maintains the naïve optimism of a gambler with a childlike smile as he helps his wife pack her bags – she’s off to stay with his parents for a while. It’s my favourite scene in the film, one where O’Connor’s comic instincts shine: she’s just thrown an ashtray at him, after the police trashed their home looking for the stolen art, yet he keeps up the clueless charm of a loving husband (“What did I do, darling?”), as if their life hadn’t just imploded. “Is this clean?” he asks, sniffing a blouse before neatly folding it into her suitcase – as if they had their whole future ahead of them. “Are you still wearing these?” he says, slipping in a pair of shoes – as if they’d ever see each other again anywhere but across a prison visiting table.
Of course, at that point we don’t yet know that this so-called criminal mastermind has no plan B – and that everything we’ll see from then on are his aimless wanderings, led by chance. Nor do we know that Kelly Reichardt herself is the real mastermind here, luring us – with a jazzy soundtrack and sly humour – into a slow-burn deconstruction of the heist movie, one that neither explodes nor fizzles out entirely.
Vaguely likeable yet quietly condemnable, O’Connor’s protagonist ends up resembling one of the stolen abstract paintings – hard to read, but never dull enough to stop caring about. I was surprised to discover that The Mastermind runs under two hours, because in its second half – well, final quarter, really, when all hope for “something to happen” starts to fade – it gives the same feeling as watching an end credit sequence that never ends.
In Reichardt’s defence, one could argue that the film wouldn’t have revealed all its subtleties in a shorter cut. But once those subtleties are revealed, the wait hardly feels justified: The Mastermind remains, to the very end, the finest kind of boring cinema.
Film critic and journalist, UNATC graduate. Andrei Sendrea wrote for LiterNet, Gândul, FILM and Film Menu, and worked as an editor on the "Ca-n Filme" TV Show. In his free time, he works on his collection of movie stills, which he organizes into idiosyncratic categories. At Films in Frame, he writes the Watercooler Wednesdays column - the monthly top of TV shows/series.
Film critic and journalist, UNATC graduate. Andrei Sendrea wrote for LiterNet, Gândul, FILM and Film Menu, and worked as an editor on the "Ca-n Filme" TV Show. In his free time, he works on his collection of movie stills, which he organizes into idiosyncratic categories. At Films in Frame, he writes the Watercooler Wednesdays column - the monthly top of TV shows/series.
