EIFF Reviews: Mission | Borges and Me | Hope | The Best Summer

Mission | Contributed

Mission ★★★★

Borges and Me ★★

Hope ★★

The Best Summer ★★★★

Thirteen years ago, Scottish filmmaker Paul Wright delivered his debut feature For Those in Peril, a haunting, fractured portrait of grief, survivor’s guilt and PTSD in a close-knit Aberdeenshire fishing community. It befuddled Cannes audiences with its beached whale ending, but properly launched George MacKay’s career and marked Wright out as one of the more uncompromising, artistically minded filmmakers out there. That comes with its own costs, of course, so while MacKay has navigated an enviable and artistically enriching path to movie stardom in the years since, Wright — after the 2017 archive film Arcadia — is only now following up his debut with another narrative feature, one similarly starring MacKay, similarly uncompromising, but more focused in its subject matter and developed in its experimental, collage-like approach.

Receiving its world premiere at the festival over the weekend, Mission casts MacKay as Dylan, a troubled waiter haunted by a traumatic, unspecified incident from his childhood in which he apparently died for four minutes and returned to the land of the living with a clearer view of life’s possibilities. It’s a memory he can’t quite square with the mundane reality of his current gig-economy existence, nor with the profound sense of alienation he feels, something fuelled by an estrangement from his older sister Claire (Rosy McEwen), whose grown-up life he increasingly views as a betrayal of their childhood dreams.

In disembodied phone conversations, Claire is baffled by this veneration of their childhood and worries that he might need professional help. Which he does, but that’s not really on the cards. His desire to recapture the feeling his boyhood brush with death once brought him has convinced him to put in motion a terrible, paradoxical plan to embrace his life by ending it in a week’s time, triggering in the process a hallucinatory downward spiral where his transgressive behaviour gets ever more extreme.

Whether what’s happening is real, all in his head or perhaps a projection (Jacob’s Ladder style) of his flat-lining seven-year-old self is all up for debate, but that’s also the beauty of Wright’s expressionistic style, which captures Dylan’s fracturing mental state in a kaleidoscopic swirl of images that mixes Adam Curtis-style documentary montages with home movie footage and elliptical voiceover to give us a sense of the chaos in his head. A knock-out turn from MacKay also helps prevent the character from becoming yet another ‘God’s lonely man’ Travis Bickle clone, connecting it instead to the contemporary crisis in masculinity, so that even at its most wigged-out, it feels rooted in something plausible. The end result — which makes good use of its Glasgow locations — isn’t an easy watch, but so what? It’s a bold and, in its own way, beautiful piece of filmmaking.

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That’s more than can be said for Borges and Me, a disappointingly stodgy slice of Scotland-set whimsy, based on a fanciful memoir by the American writer Jay Parini about the week he spent as a PhD student in St Andrews in 1971 guiding the blind Argentine writer Jorge Louis Borges around the Highlands. A more imaginative film might have used Borges’ status as “the father of magical realism” as an excuse to take some daring narrative leaps of its own, but director Marc Turtletaub — who made the 2018 EIFF opener Puzzle — demonstrates this film's limited ambition in a cringey scene where Parini (played by Fionn Whitehead) and Borges (Luis Gnecco) stop off at Culloden to conjure up the ghosts of dead Jacobites, wrongly characterising it as a battle for Scottish independence.

Mostly the film defaults to standard mismatched buddy dynamics of a road movie, with the twinkly, incorrigible Borges covertly imparting life lessons that will eventually be absorbed by the introverted Parini, who is secretly burdened with guilt over his younger brother’s decision to fight in Vietnam and is not so secretly grumpy that this babysitting assignment is taking him away from researching his thesis on the Scottish poet George Mackay Brown. Peter Mullan’s brief appearance as the latter alleviates some of the torpor, but not enough to offset the film’s egregious fondness for tartan tat.

A late addition to the programme, South Korean monster movie Hope was also a disappointment. Written and directed by Na Hong-jin (The Chaser, The Wailing) it comes with the dubious honour of being the most expensive South Korean film ever made, but is also a self-indulgent bore that comes nowhere close to justifying its 165-minute running time. It does, however, deliver some of the most laughably designed and rendered monster effects in recent memory, effects made all the sillier when you realise — somewhere around the two-hour mark — that those really are Michael Fassbender’s and Alicia Vikander’s motion-captured faces protruding from them.

Before it gets close to that point, though, we get a very over-the-top action heavy-first hour that teases out the imminent threat to such absurd lengths it starts to feel like a gag on the director’s part — a jokey way, perhaps, of commenting on the genre’s reliance on overly familiar tropes by making them even more obvious and ridiculous. But if it is a gag, it also ensures we’re so far ahead of the characters — a rag-tag group of annoying buffoons ranging from a hapless local cop who accidentally kills people to a band of tooled-up hunters desperate to put their vast arms caches to use — that the ensuing action becomes a meaningless exercise in technical virtuosity.

When the ridiculous monster is revealed, the film morphs into several different films at once: a derivative Jurassic Park/Aliens/Predator/Avatar style sci-fi action romp; a puerile genre satire, and a Marvel-stye franchise launcher in which Na belatedly switches perspective to his alien antagonists for no other reason than he wants to explicitly set up a larger saga in the film’s final moments. A final breathless car chase with a darkly funny pay-off hints at the film this might have been. But lacking the wit and flair Bong Joon-ho brought to the likes of The Host and Okja, this bloated effort feels weirdly anaemic.

For anyone who came of age in the 1990s listening to the likes of the Beastie Boys, Sonic Youth, Bikini Kill and Pavement, Tamra Davis’s found footage music documentary The Best Summer is manna from heaven. Constructed from never-before-seen video footage Davis discovered while evacuating her home in Malibu during a wildfire last year, it provides an intimate look behind the scenes of a touring festival from the summer of 1995 that brought together the aforementioned bands, as well former Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl’s then newly formed (soon to be massive) Foo Fighters.

At the time, Davis had just finished shooting the Adam Sandler comedy Billy Madison and was newly married to the Beastie Boys’ Mike D, so she packed up her camera and joined them, shooting video-diary-style interviews with the bands and capturing rough-and-ready performance footage across Australia and Asia that chimes aesthetically with the anti-corporate vibe of the times. Riot grrrl pioneer and Bikini Kill front woman Kathleen Hanna becomes the film’s de facto star, taking it upon herself to be Davis’s roving reporter and getting amusing, relaxed, sometimes quite candid interviews that stand in marked contrast to the guarded personalities populating most tour films. A blissed-out treat.

Edinburgh International Film Festival runs until 19 August. www.edfilmfest.org

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