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Los Cabos Film Festival 2016: Jackie, Voyage of Time, Hasta la Raiz, & More

The films at this year’s festival offered plenty examples of legacies lived up to and not—neglected and obsessed over.

Los Cabos International Film Festival: Jackie, Voyage of Time, Hasta la Raiz, & The Red Turtle
Photo: Fox Searchlight Pictures

When I left my apartment in Brooklyn for John F. Kennedy International Airport, late at night on November 8th, neither Hilary Rodham Clinton nor Donald J. Trump had yet secured the 270 electoral votes necessary to be elected the 45th president of the United States. By the time I got through security checks and made it to my gate—where TV screens were broadcasting returns from key battleground states—the race was called. Of course, I needn’t hear the result: I saw it on the faces of the people waiting to board, a mix of utter shock and overwhelming concern that the future of our republic would be determined by the most inexperienced, unqualified, and roundly disreputable person to ever hold the highest office.

Arriving in Mexico half a day later felt something like an out-of-body experience—and a steady stream of Dos Equis, margaritas, mai tais, piña coladas, and tequila flowing freely from the bars, restaurants, and mini-fridges of Cabo San Lucas’s Marina Fiesta hotel did little to dispel the feeling of having escaped some hell for an idyllic afterlife. Inevitably, though, myself and the other American journalists—alternately mocked and consoled by our counterparts from Canada and around the world—had to return home to face the reality of a Trump presidency, and the work to be done in order to prevent historic levels of bigotry, sexism, and xenophobia from further degrading a nation with already plenty of bad legacies to live down.

The films programmed at the fifth annual Los Cabos International Film Festival offered plenty examples of legacies lived up to and not—neglected and obsessed over. The festival’s opening-night selection, Pablo Larraín’s Jackie, even related the theme of legacy to the topical concern of the American presidency. The film follows First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy (Natalie Portman) through the period immediately following President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination, and the quiet panic of a woman who’d already lost two infants and now not only a husband, but also a cherished home.

Larraín focusses much of Jackie’s distress around an existential concern, providing two framing devices for his film: a 1963 interview conducted at a widowed Jackie’s home in Hyannis Port, M.A. by Life magazine’s Theodore H. White (Billy Crudup) and a televised tour of the restored White House that the first lady gave to Charles Collingwood of CBS News in 1962. Just the contrast of the two mediums is enough to suggest what JFK’s death meant to his wife’s legacy, or at least what she perceived it meant—and yet the filmmaker is careful not to imply that this icon’s greatest concern is for herself.

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Larraín’s Jackie is a complex figure, one whose various fears, apprehensions, and contradictions are accounted for through the conflation of personal and public loss. Jackie is a film that often looks and plays like a feature-length expansion of Lana Del Rey’s JFK-themed “National Anthem” music video: The scenes of the late president—played, interchangeably, by Brody and Aiden Weinberg—are no less fleshed out than those with A$AP Rocky in the role. At the film’s center, though, Portman’s character impresses as both a clever theoretical construction (the wife of a president who devoted her time in the White House to resuscitating the memories of presidents past, finding herself suddenly assuming the role of assuring her own husband’s historical memory) and a figure of immense emotional weight.

Larraín’s reflexively iconographic images vacillate between immediately recognizable scenes like that of the Kennedys’ fated motorcade and contrastingly, bizarrely unfamiliar ones like a tense backseat ride between Jackie and Bobby Kennedy (Peter Sarsgaard) on the way to the morgue. And these images play directly to an unstable historical record, better and more appropriately even than Larraín’s last biopic, Neruda. One sequence in particular dazzles for its accumulation of meaning: Portman’s Jackie rides in a car during JFK’s funeral procession, her face glimpsed through a window that simultaneously reflects the image of civilian onlookers—except this image isn’t one of Larraín’s own devising, but appropriated archival footage.

Jackie is a surface-level film that’s about concern for surfaces: Defending her decision to spend great deals of tax payer money on her restoration project, one admirer of Jackie’s ambitions insists, “People need to know that great men lived here.” Like Jackie herself, Larraín isn’t necessarily convinced by this sentiment, but he’s fascinated by it, and his film appropriately honors its subject’s variously superficial and serious concern for legacy.

The elusive and suddenly quite prolific Terrence Malick is fascinated, and beguiled, by nothing less than the legacy of all existence in his long-gestating, avant-nature doc Voyage of Time, which played the festival—in its lengthier, non-IMAX form—as part of the “Green” sidebar (from the press notes: “well-crafted films which move to reflections on our responsibility as inhabitants of a shared planet”). Malick’s film has some of the strangest juxtapositions he’s ever attempted, evidenced by a move from the high-def-rendered, meteoric demise of the dinosaurs to lo-fi digital of the Arab Spring. It also has more footage of fish and undersea life than it does the kinds of interstellar sequences that galvanized his monumental The Tree of Life, which helps make this feel less like a self-serious, definitive story of our origin and more an idiosyncratic curiosity keyed to Malick’s own mysterious interests.

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Voyage of Time also has to be seen as Malick’s least rigorous film, which is strange if you consider that the director apparently spent 40-odd years thinking about and conceiving it, but less so once you realize that the form it most aligns itself with (after Malick’s own style) is that of the standard nature documentary. The difference, and it’s a fairly radical one, is that in addition to functioning as more of an undisciplined travelogue than a visual essay, Malick also leaves room for his distinct spirituality. This is solidified in this film’s fairly typical, but somehow still affecting, poetic narration, which is given an appropriately self-confident yet vulnerable voice by Cate Blanchett.

Malick always maintains an interest for the intimate concerns of individuals; he contrasts the painful disharmony of modern man with the evolutionary progress of organisms working in unison. When a large, brilliantly hued jellyfish appears at the center of a school of diminutive, dull-colored ones, the next sequence depicts the latter species supplanting the former. Given the broadest of subjects to immortalize with his cinema, Malick still prefers to understand a macro legacy through its most microscopic of details.

Mexican pop-rock icon Natalia Lafourcade could learn something from that ethos: Her 2015 album Hasta la Raiz was commemorated at the festival with an excessively hagiographic documentary of the same name, which clocks in at barely an hour and which likely secured its lavish red-carpet premiere date just on the strength of the artists’s name. The film is ostensibly a look at the recording process behind Lafourcade’s event album, her first project of original songs following a heavily praised legacy set of Augustin Lara covers, but it makes all too clear that, good as the songs on Hasta la Raiz are, there isn’t really a story behind the album they ended up on.

Lafourcade found herself a very talented band, seemingly by serendipity, was offered perfect spaces in which to record (one studio is located in Los Cabos, another reason for the film’s high-profile spot at this fest), and faced no adversity of note. There’s some mildly compelling stuff on the process of composing the string arrangements that lent Hasta la Raiz its classic sound, but most of the running time is devoted to friends praising Lafourcade, her work ethic, voice, and writing in the broadest possible of ways.

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Far more effective at shoring up the legacy of Lafourcade’s album—if admittedly less package-able than a quickie, glorified CD extra—was the live concert she and her band barreled through after the screening. The performance had around 10 encores, but by the end damn near the whole audience was on their feet—even though Lafourcade and crew, in a set-ending, cheeky stage gimmick, were laying down. More than half of Hasta la Raiz made the set list, with highlights including that album’s new wave-y rocker “Mi Lugar Favorito” and swooningly dramatic “Vámanos Negrito”; an invigorating take on 2009 single “Ella es Bonita”; and a dexterous cover of the late great Mexican bolero singer Juan Gabriel’s “Ya No Vivo Por Vivir,” which Lafourcade performed as a duet on Gabriel’s final album, 2015’s Los Dúo.

While the timidity of Hasta la Raiz was counterbalanced by the go-for-broke live-music experience that largely overtook the memory of watching the film itself, Michael Dudok de Wit’s modest animated film The Red Turtle certainly didn’t benefit from its screening conditions. The Studio Ghibli/Wild Bunch co-production was one of several films for which much of the public audience was made up of very young children. For a film that relies so heavily on its visual storytelling (it’s not an uncomplicated narrative, necessarily, and there’s no dialogue whatsoever), every wailing baby or over-active kid running down aisles provided a formidable distraction. But tentative engagement may have been inevitable anyway: Dudok de Wit, working from storyboards by Ghibli godhead Isao Takahata, seems ever so content to coast on the most familiar aspects of the animation house’s style, and never particularly interested in expanding that legacy.

The minimalism of The Red Turtle serves it well in early passages, during which the film is essentially an animated Castaway and then a comical Moby Dick riff (attempts by our unnamed stranded man to escape his desert island are repeatedly met by a destructive force from an unseen, submerged sea turtle). But as Dudok de Wit builds more characters and relationships into this narrative, an absence of the character development found in even just Ghibli’s recent great films (Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises and especially Takahata’s own The Tale of Princess Kaguya) is increasingly felt.

Add The Red Turtle to the growing stack of largely disappointing films from Ghibli’s new generation of untested directors. However, there’s still some cause to feel optimistic about the studio: Days after the festival came to a close, news broke that Miyazaki would once again come out of retirement to work on a new feature film for Ghibli, to be completed by 2020. Threatened legacies do have a tendency of summoning the forces necessary to protect themselves. Here’s to hoping the next four years go by quickly.

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The Los Cabos International Film Festival ran from November 9—13.

Sam C. Mac

Sam C. Mac is the former editor in chief of In Review Online.

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