November 2024

Memoir of a Snail

Very few film watching experiences have stuck with me quite like my first exposure to Adam Elliot’s Mary and Max - unsuspectingly ordering the DVD from LoveFilm (along with Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children) (a less good film) and having my snot-nosed, 12-year-old brain and heart emotionally pulverised was a seminal, behemothic cineaste influence. Much like Spirited Away before it, Mary and Max was one of the crucial, fundamental texts that helped me define my passion for film at an early age. Needless to say, my anticipation for Memoir of a Snail was insurmountable; and I’m relieved to report that that inner, excitable wee lad is very, very happy right now. 

Elliot’s world is one of rank unpleasantries: the crude, grotesqueness of his claymated characters and the queasy details of lard milkshakes, animal fluids and squeamish sores on skin harken to a Dahlesque, storybook quality, just with an added unflinching tone of a bleak, adult intensity. Memoir of a Snail is a tough watch, home to some of the most disturbing cinematic sights in recent memory, with certain reveals that made my stomach lurch and breath quicken. But whilst some may declare this exploitative misery-porn, Elliot’s tender inflection of life-affirming optimism and rising above the trauma I personally find to be massively enthralling.

He understands that people are gross, odd looking, malodorous creatures, and that the dealings of life are often exclusively heartless: the way to tackle this is to laugh. Ridiculousness is found in the everyday vulgar indecencies of the human form, and Elliot approaches that with a quintessentially Australian sense of lewd cheekiness - the confident brashness of his work roars with this rousing sense of prideful honesty, alighting a remedy of resilience, humour and self-acceptance in the darkest, most hopeless of places. You need to laugh at yourself in order to love yourself, warts and all.

Without question one of my favourite films of the year.

Emilia Pérez

I think it’s fair to say that the term ‘Oscar bait’ is dead. What even is it anymore? Any film displaying a vague notion of esoteric or auteurist construction, lofty subject matter or *GASP * in a foreign language, simply being dismissed as ‘awards fishing’ is an incredibly provincial stance to take. However, what personally annoys me is when that direction comes from a place of cynical insincerity: there’s a difference between insightfully exploring something and just mindlessly dangling it from a string - Emilia Pérez opts for the latter to an egregious, honestly insulting degree of falsity. 

A hasty, impulsive grab-bag of ideas are strewn before the audience as a seductive, enticing allure. Bombastic musical numbers, kinetic camerawork, LGBTQ+ themes: it initially had me in its hooks. I would be lying to say some of these sequences weren’t admittedly impressive, but as the film progresses, the veil of superfluous cheap thrills slowly dissipates to reveal the true, drab emptiness of Emilia Pérez: Everything alludes to nothing. 

There’s no voice, intrigue or empathy to any of its seemingly tempting elements: they’re carrots -  a ploy to obscure an incredibly bog-standard, heinously stereotypical cartel storyline and a gruelling, trudging slog of a watching experience. Most unnuanced of all is the titular Pérez herself: She’s a macguffin. A plot-centric mannequin with zero spirit outside of the hollow, reductive moniker of ‘trans-woman’, and a clear, tone-deaf concoction from someone who is extremely cis. Perhaps a spritely, theatre-kid belting of “MAN TO WOMAN. PENIS TO VAGINA!” is maybe a tad tasteless? Or how about an incessant, tuneless number about how she ‘smells like a man’? It’s vacuous, ham-fisted performative activism in the insipid legacy of Green Book or Crash (2005) - just what the Academy salivates over. 

Rap World

Rap World is probably one of the most outlandish and authentically scruffy depictions of the creative process you’ll see this year. You may have had that lump-in-the-throat and overworked tear-ducts beholding the fragile plight of Fujino and Kyomoto in Look Back, but would you have ever expected them to goof-off on shopping carts, crash a party or spark up a fat, fuckin J (I’ve clearly done a lot of drugs) in procrastination? Guerrilla mockumentary maestro Conner O’Malley (the ‘Honk if You’re Horny’ guy from I Think You Should Leave) has got you covered in that severely lacking department. 

The dingey, front-room studio aesthetic and camcorder cruddiness screams with this dim-witted, 2009 dankness and all-nighter energy, as O’Malley and his merry men stumble through a McDonald’s and cig fuelled rap album in a single, maddening night. Imagine the spiralling, Kafkaesque twilight maze of After Hours, with the smart-stupid humour of Popstar, and encrusted in the VCR graininess of The Blair Witch Project.

The improvised, scrappy shit-post style is what defines the films nostalgically homemade grime; there are some hilarious lines here, bangers even - quotes that rank as some recent all-time howlers, although inescapable of a certain fraternal, locker-room bro-ishness that I personally really struggle with. However not as obnoxious as it could have potentially been, the perpetual douchey banter and buffoonery does strike a numbing one-note after a while, reinforcing that this is indeed an elaborate aforementioned shit-post. But arguably, that’s part of the identity: it’s creative practice in its most primordial, degenerate, and oftentimes, lamentably relatable form.