Movies are meant to explore the wild and woolly nature of human existence. This may be even more true of movies that play the Melbourne International Film Festival, which tend to observe humanity through a lens of unquenchable curiosity in every corner of the world.
The two films we are previewing for the 2024 iteration of MIFF, which begins tomorrow night, are fairly literal in their examination of the wild and the woolly, considering nothing less than the biological messiness of what it means to be procreating beings on this planet, whether human or merely human adjacent.
The first of these is the feature directing debut of actress Pamela Adlon, who may be familiar to viewers for her past work on Louis C.K.’s TV shows (but don’t blame her for his public masturbation). Babes pairs together comedic actresses Ilana Glazer and Michelle Buteau, as Brooklyn-based besties who undergo the very wild and woolly experience of pregnancy about a year apart. For Buteau’s Dawn, this is expected as she and her husband (Hasan Mihaj) already have a three-year-old and were always planning at least one more. For Glazer’s Eden, not so expected – she has a one-night stand with a fledgling actor (Stephan James) who has the nerve to die while choking on an almond before he has a chance to contact her again, leaving Dawn, an estranged father (Oliver Platt) and an obstetrician with an ever-changing combover (John Carroll Lynch) as her only support structure to get through the pregnancy.
Anyone who’s seen Adlon take the piss out of C.K. knows that she’s got one acid sense of humour, and that comes through clearly in Babes. There she always went mean, but here she keeps her characters on the right side of the line of demarcation between getting audience sympathy and failing to do so. Particularly Eden, constantly encroaching on the limited resources of her overcommitted friend, has a chance to rub us the wrong way, and Glazer has never made audiences liking her a priority. But Adlon has seen it fit to pull back on the potential gross-out instincts of a film in which bodily fluids of all kinds spray freely. She’d rather focus her energies on the travails of people who feel lost and confused among circumstances they never envisioned for themselves, even when their life is following the exact pattern they chose.
Buteau and Glazer are dynamite here. Theirs is the natural rapport of life-long friends, which only screenwriters with a keen ear can reproduce. (Glazer is one of the writers, as is Josh Rabinowitz.) While doing some new things with some new types of characters we haven’t seen on screen a hundred times before, the film also functions as one of those old-school love letters to New York City that used to come down the pike regularly. Take as one example the expression on her face when Eden realises the sushi she’s ordered for her friend, who can now eat it after finally giving birth, is $500 worth of food – and that she eats it herself on the subway once she realises that friend is conked out in her hospital bed from total exhaustion. This is where she meets her future baby daddy, fresh from his one line in a Scorsese movie.
Biology distilled down to its very essence is the subtext of Sasquatch Sunset, the latest from directing brothers David and Nathan Zellner, whose previous films include Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter. If you saw that film about a young Japanese woman who appears to believe the Coen brothers movie Fargo was a documentary, and goes to Minnesota to find the money she still believes is still buried out there in the snow, you’ll know not to expect anything traditional from the Zellners, and that will prepare you for what is essentially a nature documentary about sasquatches. Potentially the last of their kind, at that.
For a time, watching four sasquatches – two grown males, one grown female, and a third male who is either younger or just shorter than the others – might seem like a recipe for a very boring night at the movies. The Zellners don’t offer a lot in the way of plot momentum over the first 20 minutes, as the four characters munch on grass and fish, stroll through sylvan valleys and express their most basic sexual instincts. That last part is a bit of a visual joke at least, as these creatures are endowed with what looks like a runty french fry that is pointing either downward or up.
But the totally dialogue-free film increases in profundity as it goes, as well as in comedy. The sasquatches are presumably native to this region in which they dwell, but they also seem to be experiencing it for the first time, getting themselves into danger that might have been avoided if they were more familiar with their environs, as well as expressing volumes of deadpan humour through the way they wordlessly stare at new stimuli. Some of that new stimuli might also be the death of them. We gradually learn more about where and when this is, in a way that also builds and increasingly invests us.
The sasquatches are played by at least two actors you’ve heard of, those being Jessie Eisenberg and Elvis Presley’s granddaughter Riley Keough, with Nathan Zellner playing the other adult male and lesser-known Christophe Zajac-Denek as the remaining cast member. However, these actors are about as recognisable under their hair and prosthetics as if they were doing the roles in motion capture, with only Eisenberg’s eyes identifying him, and only if you look really hard. The fact that a consummately verbal actor like Eisenberg would want to play a role where he only makes monkey sounds is a testament to his belief in this odd little project, and that belief ends up being justified.
The Melbourne International Film Festival kicks off with opening night tomorrow, though don’t bother trying to score tickets to Australian stop-motion director Adam Elliott’s Memoir of a Snail, as it has been sold out for weeks. The rest of the festival runs until August 25th in various classic MIFF venues around the CBD, as well as a limited selection available online for streaming.
Babes, which earns a rating of 8/10 on the ReelGood rating scale, has screenings on August 10th, 15th and 25th, while Sasquatch Sunset (7/10) can be seen on the 22nd and 24th. You can view the full MIFF program and buy tickets here.