COLUMBIA, MO. -- Be wary of having friends who are writers or filmmakers. As the child of a novelist, I wasn't given much choice to avoid having aspects of my childhood being transmuted into prose. But I see now I was just fortunate enough that my parents were not in the business of making movies about their lives.
It makes sense that artists would look around them and find within their own simple purview many subjects that fascinate them. At True/False, a film festival committed to those blurry lines between fiction and document, reality and the fanciful, and subjective and objective, several of the films this year deal with the filmmakers' friendships, using the form of cinema to craft insightful essays as to the essence of their subjects.
There is nothing remotely objective about Tao Gu's Taming the Horse, a film concerning his old school friend, Tong, a generally harmless but emotional man who has never found what you might call a discernable path from his rock 'n' roll adolescence to steady adulthood. He spends most of his time encased in his tiny, single-room apartment -- in fact, we hear in an anguished audio clip, Tong once spent four years of his life in his room, staring out the window at the rain pattering the ground -- venturing out only here and there to make vague entreaties toward a career, or a romantic relationship.
Years before, when they were still in school together, they made a pact to someday go up to the northern Mongolian provinces where Tong was born and initially raised before his family packed up and moved thousands of miles south to the much larger city of Kunming. As the film begins, the pair of friends promise to finally make good on their pledge. As they travel north by train, Tao intercuts scenes of Tong over the years, dealing with his depressions, his failed relationships, including his on again/off again romance with a woman who had two abortions in her time with him, a pair of incidents that seems to have forever pitched him into dislocation and guilt.
As the film progresses and they get closer to Tong's Mongolian homeland, we get a fuller picture of the man, from his early days as a fetching, chain-smoking rebel, to his current status as out of work "dreamer," endlessly mired in indecision and manic dejection. In one extended riff, Tong explains his philosophy as to why he ultimately rejects the opportunity to become a jade merchant, as his mother hopes: He hates a system that rewards you for screwing over your fellow man in the name of profit. In modern China, he sees that as the very nature of the growing capitalist institution. To his mind, everybody is getting wealthy by cheating their fellow countrymen in a massive airplane-game-like fraud where only the lowest and most downtrodden members of society aren't pillaging everyone else. Put this way, it's hard to craft an argument against his judgment.
Other times, his insouciance and indifference threaten to cloud our judgment of him ("Why don't I do something?" he asks at once point, "Because I don't feel like it"), but it's not until they reach his home region that Tao lights on the dominant metaphor to describe Tong's misfortune, in the film's haunting last shot. As long as the journey has been -- as interesting as it might be, you definitely begin to feel the film's 129-minute run time -- it still hits with an impressive amount of force.
Not so much with Rok Bicek's vastly less successful The Family, though they start out with very similar conceits: Bicek, a Slovenian, has made a film about a childhood friend of his, Matej, a young man he's been shooting for more than a decade. The film opens with the (graphic) birth of Matej's daughter, Nia, with his then-girlfriend, Barbara. Despite being given a decent living space by Barbara's father, Matej is soon moving out, deciding that family life isn't for him. Returning home to live with his intellectually disabled parents and brother, Matej settles back into a life of doing not terribly much, but still trying to make time for custodial visits with Nia, which Barbara, now with another man who seems far better equipped to deal with a family, wants to severely limit.
Bicek jumps about in terms of chronology, there is footage from when Matej was a young teenager, fresh-faced, with at least some possibility of a future -- he seems pretty heavily tech-minded -- and shots of him gamboling about with his parents or other buddies, but the closer we get to the present, the more we realize Matej continues to make inexplicable choices that limit his options. Finding a new girlfriend (all of 15 years old), Matej decides to undergo a vasectomy, claiming he wants no more children, and that he doesn't think it's fair that women have to pump themselves up with hormones instead of his going under the knife.
He works somewhere, doing something, we are to suppose, but Bicek isn't interested in showing the day-in/day-out lifestyle of his subject. Instead, he wants us to see just how resistant to growing up and adapting his friend truly is, which works almost to a fault. By the time, near the end of the film, we see Matej make a stunningly awful decision about his daughter, we've already gotten more than enough of his idiotic nihilism, and his inability to project any sort of future for himself. Instead of earning our sympathy, he gets our antipathy, which leaves the character, like the film, more or less without a point.
Much more successful is Fellipe Barbosa's Gabriel and the Mountain, which also deals with a filmmaker taking a long look with an old friend. Only in Barbosa's case, it's following in the footsteps of an international trip made by his good friend Gabriel Buchmann, who died in Africa just before returning to his native Brazil. Retracing his route from Kenya to Malawi, where his body was eventually found under the shelter of a giant boulder, Barbosa uses an actor stand in, Joao Pedro Zappa, to play Gabriel, and an actress to play his girlfriend, Cristina (Caroline Abras), but populates the rest of the film with the actual African natives and fellow adventurers the charismatic and lovable Gabriel met along the way.
This brings us first to a family in Kenya, 70 days before his death, we are told, who so take to Gabriel, hitchhiking through the world, and gathering research for his master's thesis on poverty, they give him native clothing and handmade sandals, which Gabriel proudly wears as much as he can. From there, we go with him to Kilimanjaro, which he summits with the determined help of his guide, and head with him to Tanzania, before he meets up with his girlfriend, who flies in for a few weeks of the journey.
With Cristina in tow, the film takes a different sort of tack: As much as everyone seems to like Gabriel, Barbosa shows the ways in which his affability and relaxed nature could be difficult to navigate in a singular relationship. Through Cristina, we get a more full sense of Gabriel, as they fight over perceived slights and petty jealousies, bond over the adventure they're sharing, and ultimately part ways with the idea that she might be moving with him to L.A. when he begins his graduate work in the fall. Their tearful goodbye at the airport, as well played as it is by the actors, is augmented by the fact that we know Cristina actually won't ever get to see him again.
Before Gabriel leaves Africa to fly home, he tries to squeeze in one last push of an adventure: Hiking in the mountains of Malawi and trying to summit one last peak before his visa expires, Gabriel's daring nature and his dogged belief in himself prove to be his undoing, getting lost on the way back and eventually dying of exposure and sickness -- never quite specified -- alone and under his sheltering boulder. The same openness that lead him to such joy and acceptance in the country is shown to be part of his undoing, his adventurer's spirit finally slamming him into a dangerous situation from which he is unable to escape.
A photographer, he is constantly taking photos of his experiences, and even here, dying slowly and unable to extricate himself or get help, he still takes photos from his deathbed, peering out of the tall grass to a peaceful sweep of mountains, photos that Barbosa uses to frame the end of his film.
It's a tremendous loss to him and all the benevolent, kindly people he encountered along the way -- and slowly dying by oneself has to be considered tragic -- but even with his impending death, it's noteworthy that Gabriel was still able to recognize and capture the essence of natural beauty around him, even as his last breaths were being drawn. Not every subject rendered in these films is given much in the way of grace, but Barbosa is here to celebrate Gabriel, not expose him. There could be no greater a tribute to his fallen friend than that.
MovieStyle on 03/09/2018