The commercial and arthouse meet at some
Hong Kong International Film Festival venues ;b
Loving (USA-UK, 2016)
- Screening as part of the HKIFF's Gala Presentation program
- Jeff Nichols, director
- Starring: Ruth Negga, Joel Edgerton
In the space of just five days, I've happened to see two films about real-life interracial couples. The day before the 2017 Hong Kong International Film Festival began, I viewed Amma Asante's A United Kingdom,
which tells the true story of Seretsa Khama and Ruth Williams in a
moving but rather conventional way, at a local multiplex. But while
Jeff Nichols' Loving may well also get a regular theatrical run
here in Hong Kong, this drama about a Virginia couple whose marriage
would not be recognized by their state possesses a more unorthodox style
that does seem to make it more suitable film festival fare.
In
light of its subject matter, it'd be understandable if the movie had
plenty of melodramatic scenes, tense moments and grand speechifying.
We're talking, after all, about a production which tells the true story
of a Southern white man and non-white (sometimes identified as black, other times as Native American, and still other times as both) whose marriage's legality was debated all the way up to the Supreme Court.
However, Loving
is a surprisingly quiet film whose understatedness sometimes threatens
to emotionally underwhelm but lack of stillness also can provide certain
otherwise mundane proceedings with a stately and atemporal
monumentality. Also rather contrarian is the movie showing that even
while Jim Crow laws
were on the books in much of the US at the time, there were places even
the protagonists' home state of Virginia where white and non-white
people were neighbors, worked side by side and socialized (with the
unspoken idea being that poverty made them equal but that prejudices
still remained, and were liable to rear its head even in (supposedly)
friendly company).
Another
unusual aspect of this offering is its choice of an Ethiopian-Irish
actress and Australian actor in its lead roles. Still, in the wake of
British actor Chiwetel Ejiofor having starred in 12 Years a Slave
(which also had an Oscar-winning turn by Kenyan actress Lupita Nyong'o)
and Nigerian-British thespian David Oyelowo having portrayed Martin
Luther King in Selma, perhaps it actually was only par for the course that someone like Ruth Negga
would get the role of Mildred Jeter Loving and Joel Edgerton that of
Richard Loving in this US-UK co-production -- and, also, that they would
easily convince in those parts.
If
truth be told, there are a few occasions in the film when director Jeff
Nichols does appear too intent on playing with audience expectations
before subverting them. (I think particularly of a scene involving a
rope being strung up on a
tree that I thought stoked fears in too cheap a manner before dissolving
to reveal, and revel in, innocent play.) On the whole, however, the
Arkansas filmmaker has fashioned a cinematic work that is hypnotizingly
watchable and where a simple statement such as "Tell the judge I love my
wife" can mean and stand for so very much.
My rating for the film: 8.0
The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman's Portrait Photography (USA, 2016)
- Screening as part of the HKIFF's Master Class program
- Errol Morris, director
At
76 minutes in length, Errol Morris' documentary portrait of
photographer Elsa Dorfman, who took large-format Polaroid snaps of the
well known and less so, is the shortest of the eight feature length
works (seven of which have screened as part of the Hong Kong
International Film Festival) I've viewed thus far this week. It also
feels the slightest, like the kind of modest work about a friend whose
ideal audience actually would have been other friends of theirs.
Perhaps realizing this, The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman's Portrait Photography ends up having a significant chunk of it devoted to documenting its (main) subject's relationship with Beat writer-poet Allen Ginsberg and also has her recounting the evening when she photographed Bob Dylan.
Yet, the truth of the matter is that I found this work to be
considerably more interesting when Elsa Dorfman talked about what led to
her picking up a camera for the first time only as an adult and the
stories behind a number of photographs she took of herself, her mother
and also various strangers who paid to be photographed by her (and whose
"B-Side" pictures, the photographs they rejected in favor of others,
she kept even while they walked away with the "A-Side" shots).
Also
interesting is Elsa Dorfman's discussion of the rise and fall of
Polaroid Corporation which made some amazing products that the likes of
her appeared to appreciate much more highly than its company
executives. It feels like there's an interesting story there waiting to
be told but, alas, that cautionary tale still awaits to be told in
another, more ambitious film.
My rating for this film: 6.5
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