(Austria, 75 min.)
Dir. Ella Raidel
Programme: World Showcase (North
American Premiere)
Has “essay film” become the new
programming catch-all to describe any documentary that is slow, meandering, and
unfocused? Ella Raidel’s tedious misfire Double
Happiness gets a Hot Docs billing as a sumptuous essay film, but don’t
expect the playful engagement of form and content of other festival essay docs
like The Prophet to engage your mind.
Double Happiness is slow and
exhaustingly disjointed, and it reiterates the same point in a series of
rambling takes that don’t quite do justice to an intriguing topic.
The logline of Double Happiness proves intriguing as Raidel’s film offers a portrait of an idyllic Chinese land development site that recreates the Austrian town of Halstatt down to the minute details. Some sight gags of Chinese models in yodeling garb prove amusing, as do the random musical numbers, but the meat of China’s bizarre East/West complex gets lost within this case study. “Even the people are white!” says one Austrian onlooker as she takes a gander at the advertisements for Haltstatt, China before the film cuts to meandering shots that are akin to watching grass grow. The idea of cultural copying is fascinating, as is the novelty of Halstatt, but it doesn’t carry a musing that stretches itself through 75 tiring minutes.
The film shows lots of promise
when Raidel begins with an Austrian hotelier recounting the violation she felt
when she learned that one of her former guests had been surveying the town and
cataloguing it to scale for the purposes of recreating. Similarly, an interview
with a Chinese architect delves into the concept of borrowing from different
cultures in the age of globalization, while an archival interview sees a
broadcaster use Halstatt to ask a guest if China can even call itself China ten
years in the future. Double Happiness
has some ingredients to provoke a debate on shifting cultural identities in the
age of globalization and shifting powers, but perhaps the stilted lyrical form
just isn’t right mode of delivery.
Rating: ★★ (out of ★★★★★)
Double Happiness screens again on
Friday, May 1 at TIFF Lightbox at 8:45 pm.
Please visit www.hotdocs.ca for
more information on this year’s festival
Spartacus & Cassandra
(France, 81 min.)
Dir. Ioanis
Nuguet
Programme:
World Showcase (Toronto Premiere)
There are
two things I can’t stand in documentaries: screaming children and shrill audio.
Spartacus & Cassandra offers
heavy dose of both of these downers and the combination is downright
unwatchable. One leaves the film hoping that the kids will find a brighter
future and that director Ioanis Nuguet will find better microphone.
The film
looks at the lives of a brother and sister named Spartacus and Cassandra, who
are pre-teen Roma siblings taken in by a circus performer to find a better life
away from their imbalanced mother and deadbeat dad. Spartacus & Cassandra is miserablism in its most emotionally
exploitative form as the kids screech and scream in a pitch that only dogs (or
bitchy reviewers) can hear. Nuguet holds on these moments in which the members
of the family scream at one another for insufferable lengths. Intelligent
voiceover narration from the kids can’t compensate for the rough footage.
Spartacus & Cassandra
peppers its rough-and-tumble production with a handful of exquisite shots that provide
a visual thrill, but they are lifted directly from The Tree of Life. The stirring images provide a few moments of
relief, if only because they offer a brief respite from all the screaming.
Rating: ★ (out of ★★★★★)
