Reykjavík Grapevine - 21.09.2012, Blaðsíða 23

At the seashore the giant lobster makes
appointments with mermaids and landlubbers.
He waves his large claws, attracting those desiring
to be in the company of starfish and lumpfish.
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23 The Reykjavík GrapevineIssue 15 — 2012FILM Screening of ‘The Final Member’ at Bíó Paradís on September 28 at 14:00. Af-terwards head over to the Icelandic Phallological Museum (116 Laugavegur,
101 Reykjavík) for the after party, starting at 16:00.
Pick Five RIFF Capsule
Reviews by Mark Asch
rvkfilmfest www.riff.is
Reykjavík International Film Festival
27
SEP
7
OCT
Victor Kossakovsky, acting as his own cameraman and
editor, has the whole world in his hands, as this mostly
contemplative travelogue moves with liquid ease between
sets of locations on opposite sides of the globe: a bridge
over a muddy Argentine river and Shanghai’s smoggy
traffic; big-sky vistas of Patagonia and Lake Baikal; the
lava fields of Hawaii and savannas of Botswana; lofty
Miraflores, Spain, and Castle Point, New Zealand. Victor
indulges in upside-down cameras, but also impossible
tracking shots and extreme focal lengths, allowing for fresh-eyed wonder at some
seriously breathtaking landscapes, as well as the seriously droll people carving
out livings from them. Mixing and mismatching ethnic music, Victor avoids easy
dichotomies; everywhere he shoots feels like the very end of the earth.
¡Vivan las antipodas! (Dir. Victor Kossakovsky, Germany)1
Mads Brügger is the Sacha Baron Cohen of the investiga-
tive documentary, which is as much a compliment as you
want it to be. Here, he becomes, via back-channel palm-
greasing, Liberia’s consul in the Central African Republic.
With a diplomatic passport, he can, in theory and perhaps
in practice, carry out diamonds. Brügger is more success-
ful at stifling his conscientious self-doubt here than in his
North Korean comedy tour ‘The Red Chapel,’ embracing
his colonial affectations—there are many close-ups of his
brown leather riding boots, and a subplot concerns his noblesse oblige towards two
‘Pygmy’ helpers. Though Mads plays up a shadowy atmosphere at the expense of
logistical clarity, the broad strokes painted by the characters he meets—Western
meddlers, soldiers of fortune, grinning, corrupt and constantly plotting officials—at
least add up to a believable picture of the postcolonial mess we’re in.
The Ambassador (Dir. Mads Brügger, Denmark)2
Though Dario Argento is a guest of honour at this year’s
RIFF, veneration has hardly tainted his oeuvre, forever
may it gush sticky-red, like so much fake blood. In this,
his calling-card movie, innocent American abroad Jessica
Harper arrives, then inexplicably stays, at a witchy German
dance school—you know it’s witchy because someone on
the soundtrack keeps whispering “Witches!” and because
of the frozen menacing grins of the servant grotesques.
Argento jazzes up exposition with random pans across
Escher-inspired rococo interior décor; his suspense setpieces are full-throttled
with lighting gels and wildly oscillating musical cues going from zero to hysteria
and back again, in ways not always matched by the onscreen action. The frankly
unbalanced, stilted to freaky tone, makes it seem as though anything might happen;
it frequently does.
Suspiria (Dir. Dario Argento, Italy, 1977)3
Lauren Greenfield set out to make a documentary on
septuagenarian time-share magnate David Siegel and his
buoy-boobed wife Jackie—as they constructed the largest
single-family residential home in America, inspired by a
trips to the former palace of Louis XIV and the Paris Las
Vegas Hotel & Casino. The financial crisis, though, put an
entirely different spin on her metaphor for the American
dream of consumption on endless credit. To pick one of
very many scenes of well-intentioned yet tone-deaf stabs
at humility: Jackie, stalking the carpets of their Florida mcmansion in heels and
camouflage hot-shorts, lecturing her son following the starvation death of one of
their many exotic pets. He responds, “I didn’t even know we had a lizard.” Lauren
Greenfield offers time and sympathy to the increasingly unhappy couple (her put-
ting on a brave face for kids and camera, him retreating into work and dreams of a
return to dominance), but her film nevertheless makes one wish, fervently, for the
day in which it might be viewed in a history class about America’s decline.
The Queen Of Versailles (Dir. Lauren Greenfield, USA)4
“Starlet” is the name of the purse-sized yapdog belong-
ing to Jane (Dree Hemingway, great-granddaughter of
Papa), an up-and-coming porn star, adrift amid cookie-
cutter bungalows with nothing on the walls but slantwise
interminable Southern California daylight. Perhaps drawn
to a life filled in by something other than someone else’s
fantasy, she pursues a friendship with peppery senior
Sadie (nonprofessional Besedka Johnson, with a batty
tobacco-stained voice). The odd-couple setup is an indie
convention, sure, but the film’s mix of sarcasm and longing feels intuitive and oh-so
contemporary.
Starlet (Dir. Sean Baker, USA)5
Three Men And
Their Penises
Filmmakers document
the Icelandic Phallological
Museum’s search for a
human specimen
Only a minute into ‘The Final Member’
and there’s already a dismembered set
of genitalia on the screen. Sigurður
Hjartarson carries a plastic bag filled
with the bloody pink specimens: the
penises of two types of seals and a
porpoise (with both testicles). They’re
perfect and Sigurður is pleased.
Set to screen at RIFF, this docu-
mentary by long-time friends Jonah
Bekhor and Zach Math treats its
subject matter with a respect most
people aren’t accustomed to giving
phalluses. To the average passerby the
Icelandic Phallological Museum, which
recently relocated to Laugavegur 116
from Húsavík, is a curious novelty,
something to point out and laugh
about. But when Zach Math heard a
radio interview on CBC’s “As It Hap-
pens” featuring the museum’s founder
Sigurður, he saw a story waiting to be
told.
“After I heard this story I called
Jonah up and I said ‘We gotta go inter-
view Siggi, we gotta go make a movie
about this guy, because he’s absolutely
fascinating,” Zach says. “What we
uncovered is this great tension and
competition.”
The film centres on Sigurður’s col-
lection of mammal penises, a project
forty years in the making. What started
out as a private collection in his home
grew to include over 275 specimens,
from the two-millimetre penis bone
of a hamster to the seventy-kilogram
member of a beached sperm whale.
But his collection was missing one
key penis, of the Homo sapiens variety
until 2011.
MEMBERS ONLY
The film follows two men who vied for
the honour of being displayed in Sig-
urður’s collection. On the home front,
95-year-old icon and retired woman-
izer Páll Arason volunteered to donate
his member posthumously. Meanwhile,
Tom Mitchell, an eccentric American
with a red, white and blue penis, was
just as determined for his second head
(called Elmo) to hold the honour. This
battle constitutes the central conflict
of the film and also gives it some heart.
Sigurður, the dry scholar and edu-
cator turned curator, is as fascinated
by taboos as he is by genitalia and has
devoted a large portion of his life to
treating a basic, necessary but often
ridiculed body part with scholarly at-
tentiveness. Zach would go so far as
to call it a social experiment, or an art
exhibit.
“If we look at what great art does
or… what great museums do, they
force us to question things and look at
things from slightly different perspec-
tives,” Zach says. “And certainly that’s
Sigurður’s objective.”
During nearly five years of shooting
the two filmmakers developed close
relationships with the three subjects
of their film as well as with the country
itself. With the documentary set to
make its European premiere at RIFF,
the hope is that Icelanders give this
story the same attention the Canadian
filmmakers did.
“I don’t want people in Iceland
to dismiss the movie. Everyone in
Reykjavík can walk by the museum
everyday and kind of have a laugh, but
we don’t want them to just dismiss the
film because of that superficial little
experience,” Zach says. “You might
think you know this story because you
walk by the museum, but it’s way more
than you think.” - ARIT JOHN