Interesting film + Kristin Thompson question
First a brief question, then just some blather about the film and/or Nadav Lapid style. I can't imagine my scratchings would be of much interest, so just read the question and answer if you can; and gently ignore the rest.
QUESTION:
Kristen Thompson briefly covers THE KINDERGARTEN TEACHER in a festival write-up here:
http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2014/10/09/middle-eastern-fare-at-viff/
She write: "A subtly presented clue suggests the nature of Yoav’s recitations–to us, that is, if we catch it. Nira misses it, or chooses to ignore it."
What is she talking about? I did not catch this clue. The best I could come up with is that Yoav's failed-poet uncle's use of poetry to console the boy on the "loss" of his mother somehow hardwired the use of a certain heightened language as a response to intense grief. That doesn't go very deep, but Thompson seems to have something very concrete in mind, and I can't remember anything to account for the boy's admittedly pretty remarkable utterances.
SCRATCHINGS:
My reaction on first viewing was a lot like my feeling about Lapid's POLICEMAN: it excited me in the slow-burn way, with strangeness pulsing in from the woodwork, but somewhere in perhaps the final third or quarter, I felt like it kind of fell apart or otherwise lost its hold on me. Otherwise, the two films were both similar enough and different enough for me to feel like I was seeing the work of a great talent doing uneven work, this latter quality maybe proving to be part of the greatness. Having them both feel, by turns, like great films and big messes....that's part of the fragrance for me. In that sense, business-as-usual for cinema? I'm not so sure. I've seen any number of merely-excellent films that seem to paint by the number of their respective affiliations (genres, arthouse slow cinema, etc etc etc) that it feels like a breath of fresh air to see some work that seems neither "unique" nor I know I'm going to need to see each of these two features at least once or twice more. There's this pervasive sense of instability in both of these Lapid pictures. I kept thinking that I'd missed something, and not in the sense of losing the plot or missing a character relation. It could be intoxicating but also sometimes frustrating; for example, how funny was the bar/dancing scene in KINDERGARTEN TEACHER? Was it? Was it annoying? Was it meant to be cute? Was it cute? Does it need to be anything at all? Doesn't it seem like a dead-end? And maybe one among many? And do the proliferation of such dead-ends reinforce each other and create something powerful or formal? Or is this not the case, or is it the case but is it wishful thinking to call it a virtue? I once found myself irritated at some of Jean-Pierre Melville's tendencies/tics/decisions---why must we watch the whole motion? why must we see so much of this cheesy floor-show?---but those have started to seem much more intentional, functional, and even mysteriously rational to me.
Re: Lapid's possibly "not being unique": I kept thinking there might be a tribe of affective kinship with filmmakers like Ramon Zürcher, Lucretia Martel, maybe Paul Thomas Anderson's last few features; but that has to do with how I process the form of these kinds of movies and the way they work. Actually, the "tribe" is probably a lot bigger than I realize and might include lots of others (Robert Altman?) without sharing anything really meaningful in terms of a style or set of themes or whatever.