That said… Contact Lens can drag a bit like Jeanne Dielman in points, so I did at one point reach into my backpack for an energy drink I'd purchased for the next morning. It was disturbingly effective and now I'm making sure I'm carrying some little Pepsi Zeros for when I start to flag during marathon movie sessions like this.
So there's Tuesday! Wednesday would be A Grand Mockery, Every Heavy Thing, The House With Laughing Windows, the "Things That Go Bump in the East" shorts, and I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn. Today (the next Tuesday), I'll probably do The Undertone, the "Diasporing Dualities" shorts, LifeHack, and Dollhouse. Stuntman is good fun.
Sasyq (Stinker)
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
Stinker absolutely plays like a "kid hiding his new alien friend" movie, except that the kid is a homeless former classics professor in his sixties and the best jokes involve attempted suicide and a hand grenade. It's well enough made, but for who? Is last year's Steppenwolf all the more shocking because this is sort of the norm for mainstream entertainment in Kazakhstan?
It opens with that initially-nameless professor (Bakhytzhan Alpeis) attempting to end his life in various manners but not able to go through with it for one reason or another. When he's not doing that, he's hanging out in the general area of a roadside convenience store operated by crusty grandmother Nadya (Irka Abdulmanova) as she watches out for her granddaughter (Ailin Sultangazina). He's the only one that sees a UFO crash-land, disintegrating and leaving only one survivor (Chingiz Kapin). The Earth's sun would burn him severely, and it turns out that the only place nearby that approximates his home planet is the hole beneath the shop's outhouse. As the professor and the alien try to repair a communication device, the town's mayor is getting worked up over a motorcade that will pass the town in a few days, instructing a policeman to get word out to the residents to put their best foot forward, and clear away undesirables, like a homeless drunk going on about aliens.
As these movies go, it's mostly fairly pleasant and straightforward. The characters are familiar enough types played relatively well, especially once things thaw a bit and the granny and professor start warming to each other. The comedy tends toward the scatalogical - the title comes from two characters who kind of reek - but director Yerden Telemissov and coo-writer Sergey Litovchenko mostly keep their film on the side of the line where it's amusingly rude rather than truly disgusting. There doesn't seem to be much budget for special effects, but what there is looks reasonably nifty, well designed and within the limits of what they can do.
It still winds up feeling like they're executing a familiar template, and the pieces that could add some color don't do that much. The mayor, who seems to have a nice office from which to run a town that otherwise feels like a wide part of the highway, is introduced as a petty despot but never seems to have any villainous ambition or worthwhile secrets to hide. There's stuff that will maybe help the alien get home, but it doesn't amount to much other than making one wonder if police badges are literal tin in this town. There's a joke to be made about how folks in an advanced civilization don't know a whole lot about their tools in folks vaguely seeking some sort of metal, but this isn't that movie.
It means that the end is a real mess, with the mayor suddenly able to call on militarized police even though he's been leaning on one overmatched deputy (and as much as I'm kind of okay with a cop willing to prostrate himself for this mayor being the butt of some kind of mean physical comedy, the bits where he's deprived of his inhaler cross the line into cruelty), so that there can be a more bombastic climax. That's where the hand grenade comes in, and even that joke gets elongated just long enough to not be quite so much fun.
The film ambles along well enough, but it's hard to imagine anyone but kids being terribly amused, and I'm pretty sure I'd get into trouble with by brothers if I showed it to my nieces and nephews, so I'm really not sure who the audience is.
"First Rites"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Septentrion Shadows, laser DCP)
Do genre festival programmers have a sort of insider term for "short that is build-up to and execution of some sort of supernatural rite, followed by an unexpected result?" I'm not complaining about them, mind you; just noticing that they seem to show up fairly often. "First Rites" is actually a pretty good example - it starts with an awkward conversation between Martha (Vanessa Gonzalez-Egan), who claims to a private chef, and Kirk (Matt Vince), who delivers her animal blood from the meat market, his interest being unwanted and maybe inappropriate; continues as Martha tries to revive the corpse of Jane Hudson; and then hits the viewer with a punchline.
It's done well-enough, although at times I wonder about the odd part of the house where the ritual is performed (I imagine the owner of the house saying uh-uh, you shoot the whole thing in the entryway even if it looks weird and keep your fake blood away from the carpet and the dining room); writer/director Findlay Ironside and her team bring a sort of foreboding atmosphere to a suburban environment that seems like it would be extremely unremarkable just outside Martha's door, and her specific discomfort with Kirk's persistence lets one think that her motivations are one thing as opposed to something else, even though there's been a clue or two dropped. The punchline is pretty darn good.
So, yes, this is a familiar sort of short, but executed rather well.
Sweetness
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Septentrion Shadows, laser DCP)
Let's start with the usual caveats that I have never been a teenage girl and that the nieces that I only see once every few months at family things seem pretty well-adjusted. They're maybe unnecessary, because I do more or less buy into the parts of Sweetness that are about Rylee being obsessed and going horrifically overboard in a way she figures is well-meaning, even if it's not particularly exciting to me. It's the rest that kind of falls flat and makes the film a grind to get through.
Said girl is Rylee Hill (Kate Hallett), whose widowed father (Justin Chatwin) is dating a woman she doesn't particularly like (Amanda Brugel) and who gets relentlessly teased at school, although she probably isn't helping herself by doing things like having her earbuds in when best friend Sidney (Aya Furukawa) wants to include a boy or two in their hangouts. Her current favorite musician is Floorplan frontman Payton Adler (Herman Tømmeraas), and both Rylee and Sid are excited for the weekend's concert. They get separated as Sidney wants to hang out with other friends, and Rylee is nearly run over by Payton before being offered a ride home. It's not quite a dream come true - her dreams involve much more! - and that's before the supposedly-sober Payton stops at a dealer's house and crashes the car. Rylee decides she's going to help him detox, and why not - her father's job means she's got access to handcuffs, said father and Marnie are away on a weekend retreat, and she's also house-sitting a place just down the street whose retired owners won't be back from their cruise for weeks.
Roughly halfway through Sweetness, I found myself thinking that this has escalated too far, too fast, and I didn't see how the filmmakers could work with their new baseline and stakes. Sadly, they can';- it's suddenly much harder to empathize with Rylee and the filmmakers don't seem to have a new plan to get the audience to understand her (and I wouldn't be shocked if they had trouble showing this petite girl lugging people around in a way that made it believable. There's really only one scene to come that delivers on the potential of the start.
It goes to show that sometimes even a relatively small independent film can be too big. The bit about Sweetness that intrigued is two characters in a room - the idol-worshipping teen girl who needs music to hold her together and the pop star whose own issues are causing him to crack - and once everyone is spending time on Things Getting Worse and Not Getting Caught, that all winds up in the background. The movie becomes a thriller of mechanics, but the folks involved don't seem to realize this, deferring what Rylee is doing to stay ahead of things which haven't been presented as a threat yet and acting like the character's well hasn't been poisoned.
Kate Hallett puts in the effort - even at the moments when Rylee seems to have an unchanging resting scowl, the audience can feel the mix of sadness and rage within her, and even when she's confident, it's a wavering, convincing-herself confidence. Hallett can be convincing in her heartbreak and teenage earnestness, enough to pull the audience in despite everything else. It's a nice complement to Herman Tømmeraas, who convincingly presents Payton's inner turmoil in moments when he's not just a jackass or rightly terrified and lashing out at the teenage psycho or yelling for help.
The mess of the second half causes the movie to end with a quiet thud that's all the worse because the epilogue suggests an intriguing alternate explanation for what's going through one secondary character's head. Interesting and unnerving as those last scenes are, this isn't that movie, or the one that it started as.
Peau à Peau (aka Nesting)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Les Fantastiques Week-Ends du Cinéma Québéçois, laser DCP)
Peau à Peau feels like a random, zig-zagging movie that raises things and then has the filmmakers get distracted, not returning until much later, and it maybe takes a while for a viewer to recognize that it's not distraction, but a different sort of seeming randomness. While the audience is looking for some sort of casual chain, this is about traumas being stacked, and the seeming lack of a pattern is part of the problem.
Motherhood is not coming easy to Pénélope (Rose-Marie Perreault) - not only did she have a difficult pregnancy, but her baby Lou's premature birth nearly killed her, and now that he's born, he's not gaining weight even as he seems to do nothing but feed, and won't sleep through the night, with boyfriend Gaspard (Simon Landry-Desy) somehow not awakened by the crying. She's taking Lou for a walk to the local depanneur during one of these incidents when it is held up, and she recognizes the robber as her sister Charlotte (Marie Bélanger). Coincidentally, a former lover she and Charlotte met at camp as teenagers, Swiss artist Edward (Saladin Dellers) has returned to Montreal for a gallery exhibition, and rekindling that relationship highlights how frustrated she is with Gaspard.
Also, during the robbery, "Charlotte" dropped her gun and Pénélope picked it up and has been keeping it close.
Viewers are often used to seeing thrillers as clockwork constructions, mysteries which can be solved and traced from start to finish then more or less safely put away, because that is in many way how minds work for everything. This isn't how things work for Pénélope; each new crisis reminds her of the last time she was this scared and vulnerable, but others have difficulty seeing beyond the issue at hand. So while they are trying to do what they can to handle that (or just as often seeing Pénélope as a disruptive source of problems), Pénélope is creating connections in her own mind trying to find a pattern, and it's leading her to stranger and more desperate places.
On the way, I often wasn't sure what to make of Rose-Marie Perreault as Pénélope as she wavered between grounded and the sort of exhausted that occasionally results in blurting out something shocking or unfiltered, with occasional detours into what can read as overacting until one realizes the extent to which she is in the process of cracking. There's a sort of consistency to her chaotic reactions, though, and Perreault manages to keep it unnerving or desperate enough that an outburst out of almost nowhere never seems out of character, but just this moment's last stray. She and filmmaker Chloé Cinq-Mars occasionally slip a glimpse of the woman she was before her pregnancy in, sometimes briefly enough that you don't know you've seen it.
I had, admittedly, expected a more genre-adjacent film (maybe not The Babadook, but in that neighborhood), but the filmmakers use that sort of thing sparingly: Mirrors don't seem to quite work right, at least for Pénélope, and the filmmakers often edit in a way meant to unsettle, jumping forward when the audience expects to stay in the same time and place, although the occasional narrated dates in the baby diary are a reminder that not much time has passed, and Pénélope is deteriorating fast.
I suspect this one will grow on me. So much about it is built to not just misdirect, but to trigger the instincts that say a film isn't working, even if it actually is, and a second viewing with that in mind could be interesting.
"A Brighter Summer Day for the Lady Avengers"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2025 in Cinéma du Musée Even (Fantasia Festival: Fantasia Underground, laser DCP)
Where to stream A Brighter Summer Day (Prime link), or order the disc at Amazon
I think I need to see A Brighter Summer Day the next time it shows up in the Boston area, which probably won't be too long, because the various venues back home all tend to circle back around to Edward Yang eventually. I loved this short, but feel like a lot of what's in it has sort of been hanging around my consciousness for a while in clips and stills, and wonder how much Birdy Hung Wei-Ting and company are impressing me with impressive mimicry of something acknowledged to be great and how much is their distinctive spin.
It doesn't quite feel like that, though, especially when this film's Ming, after buying a bag of watermelon juice that seems like it could be on a collision course for her white school uniform, cheerfully buys a ticket to The Lady Avenger, a violent bit of pulp that she gobbles up, seeming to intimidate the boy smitten with her. You can see Hung flip the script even if you don't know what that script is, as Ming's fantasies take on a much more assertive bent and the boy starts to freak out. It's funny and unnerving on top of being genuinely beautiful.
He ma pi fu (Contact Lens)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2025 in Cinéma du Musée Even (Fantasia Festival: Animation Plus, laser DCP)
Where to stream Jeanne Dielman (Prime link), or order the disc at Amazon
A delightfully playful riff on a classic (Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles) that likely nobody would describe that weird to describe, Contract Lens can still sometimes have its inspiration's methodical nature, but pairs it with whimsy much more often as it is very much its own thing.
Bubble (Zhong Yunxi) lives on her own in a nice little apartment, tending to run late as she starts her day, screaming "I know!" when appliances inform her their work is done while she's still dressing or putting in her contacts. When not tutoring a little girl (Wu Shiqi) on her Chinese characters, she spends much of her time in the park, shooting various objects and people with her camcorder, and befriends one confident girl (Chen Fan) who seems tickled by the idea of being a muse. Bubble's "roommate" surprises her, though; she has "adopted a film", with the kitchen from Jeanne Dielman projected on a screen in Bubble's, and Jeanne (Dai Yanli) appears to be aware of the situation.
The most obvious fun comes from how writer/director Lu Ruiqi plays with the projection, having Jeanne initially bumping into the movie screen from the other side, or having Bubble occasionally seem to pass into and out of Jeanne's world, or having it interact with the balcony behind it. Lu tends to stage these moments more like magic tricks than visual effects, carefully matching Zhong Yunxi walking behind a sheet with her entering on the other set previously, or arranging things so that Dai Yanli's eyeline matches with the outside world. Lu will often start a scene blurry, bringing it into focus as Bubble puts her lenses in.
That's maybe not just a gag, but a reminder that Bubble is introverted and tends to interact with the world through a lens. She tells her outgoing new friend that many of the people she shoots are also shy and seem to prefer the camera as a mediator. She spends a lot of time on her laptop editing, and as the film goes on, she interacts more with Jeanne, though at a remove, than the friend who is right there. A fan who would "adopt" a film this way is often inherently possessive, and one wonders if Jeanne's apparent growing independence (real or imagined) springs from Bubble's fandom and obsession, and where it could lead Bubble.
The film, it must be said, is not non-stop surrealism and meta-commentary; though there are bits that are quite funny even outside of that (and I would love someone who speaks and reads Chinese to tell me just exactly how funny one of the penmanship lessons is), the film also parallels Jeanne Dielman in ways that can frustrate the folks who would avoid a three-and-a-half-hour arthouse drama, even at well under 90 minutes: We spend a lot of time watching Bubble do chores, or staring at ordinary, inactive things through the eyepiece of her camera, and repeating them. It's a contrast in some ways - Bubble has labor-saving devices that nevertheless seem to stress her out compared to the patient, methodical Jeanne - but it can occasionally give some viewers the fidgets in the way that the original film does.
I do kind of wonder how Contact Lens would have hit me without Jeanne Dielman being listed at the top of the Sight & Sound list and thus creating more of an impetus to see it when it had more bookings than usual a couple years ago. There's enough to it that doesn't necessarily require familiarity with that specific film, but it's a richer experience knowing it.
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