Simon Zhou previews the Big Nights & Special Presentations sections at the 2010 NZ International Film Festival. See more previews here.

Simon Zhou previews the Big Nights & Special Presentations sections at the 2010 NZ International Film Festival. See more previews here.

Throw on a tuxedo, loosen that pot of Dapper Dan hair-wax, and bring an umbrella so you can sing in the rain; this section epitomises why going to the pictures can still be an event.

The Opening Night film is I Am Love (dir. Luca Guadagnino), a ‘lush, operatic Italian drama about a clannish family of wealthy Milanese industrialists’ (Wendy Ide, The Times). 

The film has been lavished with praise by international critics for its sumptuous visuals and Guadagnino’s flamboyant direction.  If Guadagnino’s previous film, Melissa P (a heady exploration of adolescent sexuality adorned with fleetingly beautiful images that evoke the same sense of longing for innocence lost as Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides) is anything to go by, this melodrama should have enough real gravitas not too feel overly melodramatic.

The film in this section that has me sweaty palmed and swooning like a teenage schoolgirl is Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy.  Considered one of the greatest living directors in the world today, Kiarostami’s films ignore cinematic conventions of how to represent or tell a story on celluloid, finding its own organic language that in its formal exploration, transcends the boundaries of what a film can be. 

Always inquisitive about film form (the most audacious example being the ending of his Palme d’Or winning film, Taste of Cherry, which outraged as many critics as it delighted), the semantics of his films often have philosophical ambitions, asking questions of what it means to be human, how one should live, and what can be gained in dying. 

In Certified Copy, we find him in a wistfully romantic timbre; the first film he has shot out of his native Iran, Kiarostami has daringly paired veteran Juliette Binoche with a novice actor making his screen debut in William Shimell, and judging from the accolades coming out of Cannes with the film scooping the Best Actress award for the ever ebullient Binoche, the film should live up to its lofty expectations. 

Also of interest in this section is:

• Gainsbourg (dir. Joann Sfar), a biopic of notorious 60s chanteur and lothario Serge Gainsbourg (infamous for his song which simulated sounds of a female orgasm).   Incidentally, Serge is the father of actress and chanteuse Charlotte Gainsbourg, last seen mutilating herself in Lars Von Trier’s Anti-Christ which played in the 2009 NZIFF.

• Sherlock Jr/One Week (dir. Buster Keaton), a double billing of slapstick comedy silent era classics directed and starring Buster Keaton.  Keaton’s stature as a comedic genius of the silent era is rivaled only by Charlie Chaplin, and supported in this screening by a live performance by the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra, it is sure to sell out quickly.

•  A Prophet (dir. Jacque Audiard) Having already seen the film, I can reveal that it is unconditionally brilliant in its gritty, visceral psychological exploration of a petty criminal who is forced to make the only moral choice he can in order to survive in prison.  An arresting examination of organized crime, and as a character study of a man who loses his morality, I prefer it even to Francis Ford Coppola’s classic, The Godfather.  A must-see.