MIFF Capsule Reviews: Ferrara’s Tommaso, Herzog’s Meeting Gorbachev & Diaz’ Our MothersAt this year’s Melbourne International Film Festival, I’m bouncing from film to film at a pretty ridiculous pace. As a result, I’ll be doing my best to provide reviews of as many films as possible. Some will be amply explored. Some will be missed. But most will have to be covered in capsule form. Today is a capsule review day, and I’ll be looking at Abel Ferrara’s Tommaso, Werner Herzog’s Meeting Gorbachev and Cesar Diaz’ Our Mothers.

Abel Ferrara’s Tommaso

Going in to Tommaso the word on the street was typical of a Ferrara film. The split between loving it, hating it, and complete indifference was pretty even but everybody agreed this was his most personal work in a long time.

I’m not entirely sure what that last part means – I’ve always felt Ferrara’s films to be agonisingly personal – but there’s no doubt that he’s fully exposed in Tommaso. Narratively speaking, the film is essentially a wander through the day-to-day life of an American filmmaker living in Rome with his young wife and infant child. Between AA meetings, acting classes, meditation and script writing, Tommaso (Willem Dafoe) does his best to deal with family life as he quietly struggles with his own deeply ingrained personal issues.

Tommaso is a character wracked by guilt over the personal failings of his drug-addled years, most particularly his failings as a father. He is frequently infantile in his needs, whilst projecting his own inadequacies on to his long-suffering partner as he attempts to assert an almost parental authority over her. He is jealous, chronically prone to infidelity (or at least fantasising about infidelity – I’m not entirely which), self-loathing, yet constantly aspiring to be greater than the sum of his parts. He is a man of deep introspection but frequently shallow actions. And yes, it seems likely that he is in many ways Abel Ferrara.

That’s all you need to know. Everything they say is probably true. Uneven. Overlong. Meandering. But I must confess, I really don’t care. Ferrara is one of the few filmmakers consistently willing to open himself up and genuinely expose the fallibility of the human condition. And as he gently pushes you down his own personal rabbit-hole towards the film’s inevitably confronting conclusion, the visceral impact of Tommaso is hard to deny.

Werner Herzog’s Meeting Gorbachev

Eccentric and brilliant German filmmaker Werner Herzog meets Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union. What’s not to love? On paper it sounds like my favourite documentary of the year, but unfortunately in reality it turns out to be a middling work.

The problems start when it becomes clear that Herzog is approaching Gorbachev with the schoolboy reverence of a child meeting his hero. Herzog sees Gorbachev as a leading figure in the reunification of Germany (which he was) and has no interest in complicating this image by challenging Gorbachev’s take on events. Gorbachev for his part comes across as a likeable human being, but one prone to reductionism, answering different questions to those actually being asked, and with an unwillingness to discuss or engage in the historical minutiae of politics.

Herzog, on the other hand, attempts to ask questions that elevate the struggles of the final days of the Soviet Union and a divided Germany to mythic status, an impulse which Gorbachev persistently and gently resists, resulting in the sense that the two men are attempting to force the construction of two entirely different films.

Where the film is strongest is in conveying the sadness that Gorbachev feels relating to the fall of the Soviet Union, and to the loss of his wife. Although the scenes dealing with the latter are marred by some questions from Herzog that feel unnecessarily intrusive and designed to force a reaction from the (at the time) 87 year old.

More value is obtained from side-interviews with leading political figures of the Soviet Union, Germany and the United States. But ultimately, not much new comes out of the decent, but generally underwhelming Meeting Gorbachev.

Cesar Diaz’ Our Mothers

I can imagine Cesar Diaz’ Our Mothers having a profound impact on audiences in its native Guatemala, where some of the film’s deficiencies of storytelling would be compensated for by the viewers’ deeper knowledge and direct experience of the history to which it is tied.

The history in question is that of the 36-year civil war that divided the nation from 1960 to 1996, a violent rift between the government and rebel forces. It is a conflict that began with idealism and ended littered with genocide, torture, rape, and murder. The film takes us to the modern day, where we meet our protagonist, a young man named Ernesto (Armando Espitia) employed as a forensic expert to identify the countless unidentified bodies that continue to be uncovered following the civil war.

Ernesto is haunted by the ever-present absence of his father lost in the conflict (whom he never met), and when he believes he may have uncovered evidence of his father’s final resting place, he starts to break rules to find out more. As the title suggests, the generation that precedes Ernesto is disproportionately female, a huge number of men having been killed in the war. As a result, Ernesto largely relies on the accounts of the mothers and wives of those lost to find his way, all of whom are deeply haunted by the horrors that they’ve observed. His mother in particular (Emma Dib), whose reticence to discuss the past becomes the hook upon which the whole movie rests, seems torturously bound to her memories of the past.

The film is beautifully shot, and the performances are generally strong throughout, but ultimately this is by the numbers storytelling buoyed by the weight of the issue being dealt with. The surprises feel gratuitous and obvious, the writing tends towards the melodramatic and the journey is presented in monotone. A worthy subject matter, competently but routinely explored.