The Melbourne International Film Festival is featuring the works of Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman as a showpiece artist for this year’s festival, set to kick off tonight and run the next 17 days. Known for having scored the top film in the 2022 Sight & Sound poll of critics and filmmakers – the ungainly named Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, also playing the festival and already sold out – Akerman had a career comprised of both documentaries and feature films, with the defining traits of each informing the other.
How appropriate, then, that we here at ReelGood should preview the 73rd MIFF with a documentary from a man known for his narrative films, and a narrative film from a man known for his documentaries.
And they both contain the theme of music, including but not limited to staged musical numbers.
The first of these is Pavements, Alex Ross Perry’s playful piss take of the rock documentary, and also the rock biopic, and also the jukebox musical. Perry has thrice played the festival with his narrative features Listen Up Philip, Queen of Earth and Golden Exits, but a new period of his career seems indicated in that a second documentary, Videoheaven, is also playing MIFF in 2025.
Pavements is about Pavement, the atonal rock band fronted by Stephen Malkmus, which besotted indie rock audiences throughout the 1990s before breaking up in 1999. They reunited once in 2010, but it’s the 2022 reunion that has kicked off the currently documented orgy of celebration of “the world’s most important and influential rock band,” as they call themselves with tongue firmly planted in cheek.
Which orgy of celebration? Perry, with the band’s presumedly somewhat circumspect cooperation, has cast a series of known actors to portray Pavement in a biopic, has worked up a jukebox musical of their songs called Slanted! Enchanted!, and has even mounted a pop-up museum to artefacts from their career.
It’s all for a laugh, of course, though the key is that neither Perry nor the band ever break character or telegraph their true satirical intentions. Actors like Jason Schwartzman and Joe Keery are game for the challenge, talking about their method of learning their characters for the biopic, while actress Zoe-Lister Jones is a key character on stage for the musical, earnestly belting out songs that were never designed for this format. (And yes, all of these were actually staged and/or filmed in some capacity.)
Fans of the band will eat this up like catnip. Everyone else will at least find it an interesting curiosity. Perry brings a truly kaleidoscopic montage approach to the visuals, interspersing real concert footage, both from then and now, with these various interviews, concert posters, and other bits of ephemera from Pavement’s career. And even though it takes a real familiarity with their discography to get everything out of this that you possibly could, there’s a basic watchability that does give the uninitiated a sense of the Pavement ethos, even as it’s playfully skewering it.
The stage musical portion of Pavements takes centre stage in The End, Joshua Oppenheimer’s look at the last family on Earth – as far as we know – through the lens of a musical. If that name sounds familiar, Oppenheimer is himself a two-time MIFF veteran, having imprinted permanently on the brain of festival audiences with his twin documentaries about the aftermath of a 1960s Indonesian genocide, The Act of Killing followed by The Look of Silence.
If you think it’s completely incongruous for this man to be making this movie, you might have misunderstood the primary mode of The End. Although the basic setup of The End sounds like a joke, especially if you consider “And it’s a musical!” to be the punchline, Oppenheimer approaches the film with the earnestness that characterises that form, not a person making something audacious and absurd. And yes, the same themes of guilt over past actions, or possibly inaction, are present.
Michael Shannon plays the CEO of a petroleum company who built a massive bunker out of an abandoned salt mine, to ride out some sort of environmental calamity, possibly forever – and then proceeded, for reasons that seemed good at the time, to exclude almost everyone else from living there, even close friends and family. His immediate family – played by Tilda Swinton and George MacKay – have not seen it fit to question his methods or decision to this point, nor have the small group of friends and other servants who were permitted entry. But it’s now more than two decades since this happened, and the arrival of a young woman from “the surface” – played by Moses Ingram – has them all questioning whether such shortsightedness was the right thing for this family, for all the other people who could have stayed here, and indeed for the longevity of the species.
While the musical numbers are certainly the headline here, and they are executed competently if not always memorably, they are not the portion of The End that really connects. That portion is the steady realisation, released periodically throughout Oppenheimer’s script, of what compromises occurred to reach this moment in time. To reach a moment in time when a few people get to live in the same opulence they enjoyed previously, as long as they don’t think too much about it. Environmentalism may have no greater champion.
The title here is no coincidence; although the events of this film may not (or may, no spoilers) strictly spell the actual demise of this family, their devil’s bargain has entered us into end times for the human race. Whether that happens now or 50 years from now, it’s here, no two ways about it. It’s hard to make a joke about that sort of fatalism, but it’s hard not also to realise that for Oppenheimer, we are these people, making self-serving choices while dooming others to a world they cannot inhabit. It’s a mood we may be feeling in both literal and metaphorical ways as the world continues to spiral towards the inevitable.
And on that happy note, go see these films! They are both sure to stimulate.
Pavements is playing Sunday August 17, Wednesday August 20 and Saturday August 23 in the city, as well as regionally at other times. The End will bow this Sunday followed by showings the next two Fridays, the middle one in IMAX, as well as via MIFF streaming. Tickets can be purchased here.