Florida Film Festival 2014 - Day 3 & 4

I had a short but good Monday night at the festival with two very good films. Every Monday night for the past several years has been Italian Night at FFF, with a retro Italian film being screened leading into a nice spread outside the Enzian sponsored by a local Italian restaurant (this time by Buca di Beppo). Whether Italian or otherwise, I've always seen the movies featured in the retro screenings before, but this night's film, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, was not only new to me but a film I had never even heard of before. Shame on me because it is a clever and funny satire about a high-ranking officer who kills his mistress then plants clear clues to see if the police will charge him with the crime, much less figure out that he's the culprit.

FFF favorite Bill Plympton is here as usual, but this time with a animated feature, his first since Idiots and Angels five years ago. In his post-screening Q&A, he scoffed at the widespread belief that animation is relegated only to big-budget CGI cartoons targeted to young children and this movie, Cheatin', certainly aims to dispel that myth. It's a bawdy, sexy, yet ultimately touching and of course hilarious look at a couple torn apart by infidelity, brought through with Plympton's typically expressionistic artistry.


Tuesday:

Ilo Ilo is a nicely rendered story about a Filipino maid who moves to Singapore to be a live-in maid with a couple and young child. It's a remarkably poised movie from first-time director Anthony Chen. In some respects reminiscent of the films of Hirokazu Kore-eda, Chen's camera work is straightforward but knowing, and ruefully observant, such as in a rare tender moment between the two parents, the shot seems to almost hide behind a bedroom television set as these two finally show some affection towards each other when throughout the film they've mostly been antagonistic.


The shorts programs this year (except for the Midnight Shorts) have really been killing it and the Shorts Program 1 is no exception. It was kicked off by Fool's Day, one of the more uproarious shorts I've seen in sometime about an elementary class's prank that goes awry. Also terrific was ZZZZZZZ, about a couple of sleepwalkers. The bulk of the short exists as a sort of avant-garde, slightly off-kilter look at odd cityscapes and would've been terrific if it was only that. But the final moments turn it into something more longing and more touching. The program ended with almost the reverse, in Setup, Punch. a heartbreaking moment in the middle of a stand-up comic's set gets revealed to be something slightly unexpected.

The night ended with the goofily titled The Final Member, about the Sigurdur Hjartarson (affectionately know as "Siggi"), an Icelandic man who founded and curates the only museum dedicated to penises. The museum contains thousands of specimens and the title refers to the one missing piece in the collection, one from a human being. Really the movie weaves together three stories: the one about Siggi and his search; a legendary (and aging) Icelandic adventurer named Pall Arason who has agreed to donate his penis after his death; and a Californian name Tom Mitchell, who is so proud of his junk he's willing to have it surgically removed so he can be the first to have it displayed at the museum.

The Mitchell story is fascinating and it certainly on first blush seems that he suffers from some kind of psychosis. But while he is in some ways the villain of this story, antagonizing Siggi with lengthy emails and calls about his ideas for how to display his submission to the museum, the film does well to not overplay that hand, pulling back from its judgment to show a real person with a bit of an odd relationship to his privates.

Great too is the film's (and its subjects') matter-of-factness about some normally cringe-worthy material. That's not to say I didn't cringe. A discussion about removing your penis, dead or alive, is not a particularly happy thought. But the film remarkably does have a spirit of happiness and even glee. Scenes like Siggi's tour of the penis-themed gift shop is quite a riot and make the film at times guffaw level funny. It's no wonder that the middle letters of the Icelandic Phallological Museum spell "lol".