MIFF 2011 Film Review: MEDIANERAS and Random Strangers (short)

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By Follow @eleanorcolla

Medianeras is the strong feature film debut from Argentinean Gustavo Taretto. Living in neighbouring apartment block in Buenos Aires are Martin and Mariana. Martin is a web designer who works from home and suffers from numerous phobias including agoraphobia. To combat this, his therapist suggests he take up photography and so now Martin goes for short walks with his ex-girlfriend’s dog and his backpack with emergency supplies (including, but not limited to, an emergency procedures booklet, 400 pesos, condoms, and the complete collection of Tati films).

Mariana is an architect who has never designed a building and so now designs shop windows. She has left her long-term boyfriend, also has agoraphobia as well as a fear of lifts and bails on a potential date. Naturally, the two have numerous things in common and various near-meeting moments.

Medianeras is good. It’s not great, but it’s good. Some plot lines are picked up and then completely forgotten and whilst I can see why- with all of the neuroses and near-love moments- that people have compared this to a Woody Allen film, yet I don’t believe it’s quite there.

Opening for Medianeras was Random Strangers a short film by Alexis Dos Santons (Glue, Unmade Beds). Running at 25 minutes, Dos Santos looks at the bonds that can be formed with complete strangers facilitated by the internet. Appearing to be based on a Chatroulette* styled-site we meet Rocky from Germany and Lulu from Argentina as they slowly become friends, writing songs for each other, doing dances and creating clay-mation movies. Dos Santos also intertwines these stories with moments of their real lives, all shot in the same style as his two previous films. An interesting look at the power of modern technology and the power of modern relationships.

*[click at your peril – Ed]

MIFF 2011: Fruits Of Paradise

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By Christopher Mildren

Czech director Vera Chytilova is renowned and revered outside of her homeland largely because of the wonderful freewheeling swipe at good behaviour for girls Daisies from 1966. Thank MIFF for resurrecting one of her other too-rarely screened films, the Eden story phantasmagoria Fruits of Paradise.

A retelling rich in obscure symbolism, it has more of a direct narrative thrust than its more familiar ancestor, but it’s hardly an unambiguous affair. It begins with one of the most intoxicating montages I’ve seen, a five minute strobing of flora close-ups and psychedelically imposed Adam and Eve figures. The hallucinatory mood is retained through out the main body of the film, a stylised tale of Eva, her husband Josefa and the charismatic serpent like figure of Robert, who may or may not be a murderer of young women. It is almost entirely shot outdoors in those overgrown fields and forests, quarries and swamps that seem to afford such dark menace to films east of the curtain.

The plot, such as it is, is told in typically clever Chytilova fashion, in stylised dramatic sequences, often with jarring in-camera effects, giving the film a dreamlike mood. Despite the overriding concern with dangerous desire and a cavalcade of beautiful nudes, it is not a heated film, instead more childlike with a sinister undercurrent. The visual invention sags a bit towards the end, but a climactic chase through a twilit forest involving a long piece of blood red material is astounding.

Chytilova’s way of exploring murky psychological complexity through arresting imagery is a treasure, and I hope this screening opens the way to more of her unique work seeing the light of day.

9/10