His & Hers (**1/4)

This Irish film was kind of the opposite of, but also kind of like, the documentary I saw a couple of weeks before it, Babies. Babies was a primarily visual movie set in four cultures about the pre-linguistic phase of human life. His & Hers is a primarily aural movie, set particularly among the Irish middle class, about all of the other phases of life. Despite the title, everyone in the movie is a girl or woman. Beginning with the youngest and finishing with the very elderly, it presents a succession of brief interview segments in which the women, dozens of them, ruminate upon, primarily, the men in their lives. For the youngest, the man is “Daddy.” Then come boyfriends, husbands, sons, husbands again, and grown children.

The way it’s like Babies is that there’s no strong point of view. But at least Babies showed, and this just tells. So rather than looking at someone’s well-edited home movie, this is more like chatting with a succession of strangers at a cocktail party, and is less than compelling. Teenage pregnancy, poverty, divorce, and even careers are all absent from these vignettes, in which the women appear either talking to the camera or doing housework. The last few segments, though, are poignant, as finally we get to illness, loss, and a kind of contentment that is hard won. Whereas the young ladies’ tales of driving lessons and white dresses seem obvious and insubstantial, the widows’ stories of going to bed alone, of enacting once-shared rituals without the husband, seem somehow substantive enough to stand alone without having to know more about these women.

IMDB link

viewed at World Café Live [screening] and reviewed 5/10/2010 [no regular theatrical release in Philadelphia]

Babies (**3/4)

Imagine that you had a baby and let a film crew follow film your child extensively throughout the first 18 months of life, and then edit the resulting footage down to the most adorable and/or comic 20 minutes. Multiplied by four, this is pretty much what director Thomas Balmes has done. Two babies are from wealthy urban centers, Tokyo and San Francisco, and two are from rural areas of poorer countries, Namibia and Mongolia. Two are boys and two are girls, but at this age you don’t notice so much.

The babies interact with parents, animals (pets in the cities, wildlife and domestic animals elsewhere), other babies, and objects. No narrator interjects. No onscreen titles explain anything beyond view of the camera. No subtitles translate the dialogue, but it’s minimal and obviously trivial anyway. Of course, one cannot help but observe the obvious cross-cultural differences and similarities. Western babies spend a lot less time naked. Japanese people apparently sing “Happy Birthday” in English. But, just as obviously, there is no agenda here, no point of view at all, really. Whether this makes the film beautiful, vacuous, or both is debatable.

IMDB link

viewed 4/28/10 at Rtiz Bourse [PFS screening] and reviewed 5/7/10

My Kid Could Paint That (***1/2)

Amir Bar-Lev (The Tillman Story) set out to make a documentary about a four-year-old painter, Marla Olmstead, but, as the reporter who “discovered” her says in the film, the story is really about grown-ups. Above all, it’s about her parents, amazed as the abstract creations of a little girl in Birmingham, New York, fetch thousands of dollars from collectors around the world. (Mom worries about whether Marla will be negatively affected by her celebrity; Dad rather enjoys the ride.) It’s also about the people who consume art. Are they buying these paintings because they love them, because of the novelty, or both? Why does it matter if a little girl created them? And how, especially in the case of these non-representational works, does anyone know if they’re good?

And finally, the movie is about the filmmaker himself. After a 60 Minutes story casts a skeptical eye on whether the girl actually is actually much of a prodigy, Bar-Lev wonders, on camera, whether the story is about a child’s unexpected rise to fame or something more like “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” and how his choices as a filmmaker will shape that perception. (The short film on the DVD expounds on these ideas further and is well worth a look.) I don’t know art, but I know I like this movie about it.

( See Exit Through the Gift Shop for another look at how perception creates art, or at least its value.)

IMDB link

viewed 9/26–27/10 on DVD [Netflix rental] and reviewed 9/27/10