In five years covering Miami Film Festival for HTV, I’ve rarely seen programming this adventurous, queer-friendly, and adventurously queer-friendly. We’ve reached the end. Here are two more films to catch this weekend if you’re local.
Knife + Heart, dir. Yann Gonzalez
More than poetry, film is the ground on which Eros and Thanatos battle and, more often, join forces. In Yann Gonzalez’s Knife + Heart, the urge to kill is inseparable from the urge to fuck. Set in the French porn industry of 1979, Anne Parèze (nineties Europop star Vanessa Paradis) can’t stop the murder of the actors in her lurid gay snuff flicks (sample titles: Anal Fury and her current Homocidal). Distinguishing her lover Loïs (Kate Moran)’ editing from the process by which the killer finds his first victim is part of Gonzalez’s game; the audiences know him as a man in a fetish mask and his preferred method of killing is with a switchblade dildo — that’s it. Maybe that’s all we need.
Shot by Simon Beaufils using the Skittles color spectrum, Knife + Heart flirts with the ponderous and often gets in bed with it, gleefully: imagine late seventies Brian de Palma, the Dario Argento of Profondo Rosso, and any Friday the 13th of your choice, then treated it as Play-Doh. Distinguishing between reality and film becomes hopeless. Savor Knife + Heart as gay bacchanal and it’s a treat — bodies in ’70s drag writhing to the rhythm of M83’s clanging score.
WHEN AND WHERE: Sunday, March 10, 8:45 p.m. at O Cinema Miami Beach
Ash is Purest White, dir. Jia Zhang-ke
Connecting the disparate provinces of China is the Yangtze River, whose centrality in the nation’s development cannot be overstated. From Still Life (2008) to Mountains May Depart (2014), it has figured as a leitmotif in the films of Jia Zhang-ke, a director who has observed the wrinkles in China’s modernization with a quizzical eye. Ash is Purest White falls short of his best thanks to a murky second half. Yet the sharpness of Jia’s partner and stock company player Tao Shao’s performance and a couple of limpidly subtle sequences save the picture.
Tao is Qiao, a widow stuck in a failing coal town with her grouch father and a gangster boyfriend Bin (Fan Liao), who does more posturing over cards and drinks than killing, although he does that too. When a power vacuum turns Bin into de facto boss, Tao saves his life. She takes the rap and serves five years in prison. As a free woman she wanders through a landscape that has changed; even the Three Gorges Dam, star of Still Life, looks more imposing. This is the strongest part of Ash is Purest White: Tao as Jeanne Moreau in Michaelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte, taking in the sights with increasing wonder. Best is a reconciliation between her and a ravaged Bin set in a hotel room; the former couple submit to the gradations of resentment as Jia’s camera lingers just long enough on each actor’s face before moving at a snail’s pace to the next, a neutral advocate. Who’s right or wrong, he implies, no longer matters when the ashes of love need gathering.
WHEN AND WHERE: Sunday, March 10, 5:45 p.m. at Silverspot Cinema
Humanizing The Vacuum 