5 Movies to See at IFFBoston 2019
The 17th Annual Independent Film Festival Boston begins today. Here are five movies to catch.
Header images via IFFBoston/Skunkadelia/Judy Wong
Robots, like film festivals, comprise whatever spare parts the craftsman has at their disposal. Gears for eyes, nuts and bolts for arms, a tin bucket for a torso for robots; films from Alex Ross Perry, Jennifer Kent, Lulu Wang, Riley Stearns, Paolo Sorrentino, Julius Onah, Daniel Scheinert, Nanfu Wang, Justin Chon and Lynn Shelton among countless others for festivals. So goes the ingenious pairing of Independent Film Festival Boston’s 17th annual run with its chosen event mascot, an adorably scrappy automaton.
Some of IFFBoston 2019’s parts fit in pleasing disharmony, where movies sharing common surface traits clang against each other in ways that highlight what makes them each work. If they’d screened on the same day, for instance, Perry’s latest, Her Smell, could make a great double feature with Wild Rose, the new film from Tom Harper. (Alas, the former plays Saturday and the latter on Sunday.) Both movies orbit the lives of women laboring in the music industry. Both movies trace redemption arcs for those women across years. Neither’s an especially feel-good experience, but Her Smell is so aggressive, urgent and abrasive, it effectively pares down Wild Rose’s thorns in comparison.
Her Smell chronicles the fall and rise of Elisabeth Moss’s Becky Something, a Courtney Love surrogate and frontwoman of the punk rock band Something She; Becky talks like a Wonderland character but acts like an uncaged animal. Moss being an actress whose greatest asset is her eyes, and Perry being a filmmaker who fixates on the human gaze, Becky spends the movie staring either at other characters or into the camera. Her eyes burn like toxic twin moons.
The movie’s first three quarters light the match of her self-immolation. In the punk rock world there’s little more stultifying than commercial success; add in a poisonous personality and an enthusiastic drug habit and Becky’s unmaking—by her own hand—is assured. Yet, the film’s final act redeems her, such as Perry’s movies redeem anyone. In contrast to his other work, Her Smell is compassionate, even tender; Becky, later seen sober, washed up and repentant for her years as a monster fed on abusing her ex-husband (Dan Stevens), her bandmates (Agyness Deyn, Gayle Rankin) and her mother (Virginia Madsen), sings a devastatingly moving cover of Bryan Adams’ “Heaven” to her daughter in a moment equally as gentle as it is painful.
Even in the recovery phase, Her Smell delicately walks a perilous tightrope and arrives on the other side as the masterpiece of Perry’s career. Wild Rose, on the other hand, follows an easier redemptive course. It’s familiar. Familiarity isn’t a bad thing, mind, and Wild Rose presents a version of that star-is-born narrative that works in spite of it: Ex-con Rose-Lynn (Jessie Buckley), fresh out of prison for a drug offense, goes right back to her dreams of country music stardom immediately on her liberation. If the film is distinctly unfamiliar in any way, it’s in the telling of a Glaswegian’s efforts to go to Nashville to get made.
Still, Rose-Lynn tries, and like Becky, she has two children to consider, both raised by her mother, Marion (Julie Walters), currently the only custodian they acknowledge. Rose-Lynn is a stranger to them, and stranger still as she continues her selfish pursuit of her dreams by imploring her new, wealthy employer, Susannah (Sophie Okonedo), for support. Susannah eventually acquiesces. Director Harper asks what it means for Rose-Lynn to pursue her ambitions, and he asks more directly than Perry does.