Spank's LFF Diary, Wednesday 04/10/2023

Reviewed today: Macario, You Can Call Me Bill.

6.00pm: Macario [trailer]

We've got lots of reasons to cheer this particular screening. The tube strike that we thought would make it awkward getting to the film on time was called off yesterday! Hooray! We're starting off our festival with an archive restoration! Hooray! And this is one of those years where the first film we're seeing starts a full hour before the official opening gala, meaning that we're at the real opening film and balls to Saltburn! Hooray!

Programmer Jason Wood is equally pleased to be introducing this film, insisting it's his favourite from this year's festival. He's even got a message of support sent by Guillermo del Toro, who’s very keen for classic Mexican films like Macario to get a wider viewing. Directed by Roberto Gavaldón in 1960, it's the story of the eponymous poor woodcutter (Ignacio López Tarso) trying to support his wife (Pina Pellicer, referred to throughout as 'Wife') and five terrible children, who hoover up all the food and money he has and still keep demanding more. All he wants, he complains after one particularly unsuccessful attempt at dinner, is something he can have just for himself. His wife takes pity, and steals him a turkey from one of the families she works for.

At this point, Macario is operating in a fairly realistic register, offering some standard commentary on how the rich and poor co-exist uneasily in Mexico. But even then, the story opens on the Day of the Dead, meaning that visually there are lots of hints at a more supernatural world lurking just beneath the surface. And when Macario goes into the woods to eat his turkey away from the eyes of his greedy hellspawn kids, realism is jettisoned with remarkable speed, and the film becomes a moral fable on the dangers of getting what you want. Inevitably, at some point the Church will get involved, and things will get messier.

Adapted from a story by B Traven, Macario is an incredibly good-looking bit of magical realism, with Gabriel Figueroa's photography getting more and more unearthly as the film progresses. (As Jason Wood has already warned us, the climax looks particularly spectacular in this new restoration.) There's also a welcome degree of morbid wit running throughout, all the way up to the splendid final line of dialogue. Yes, this counts as a good start. Hooray!

9.00pm: You Can Call Me Bill [trailer]

Alexandre O. Philippe is having a very successful run at the LFF: as he points out in his introduction, five of his six most recent films have now played here. And why shouldn't they? The deep-dive documentaries he makes about the movies are just the sort of things that film festival audiences love to watch, whether they're about a single scene in Psycho or the key location of most Hollywood Westerns. Up until now, I'd have said that the odd film out in his back catalogue was Leap Of Faith, which is less a documentary about The Exorcist and more an extended interview with its director, the late great William Friedkin. But now he has another film based around a face-to-face discussion with a different Bill: not Friedkin, but Shatner.

I've never really bought into the whole cult of William Shatner, which seems to be built largely around ironic appreciation of his slightly mannered performance style. It's possible Philippe feels the same way, as he warns us at the start that "this isn’t the Shatner film you were expecting." Over three days of interviews, Philippe delves into multiple aspects of Shatner's personality. The straight actor who has some pretty solid ideas about how comedy works. The family man who claims not to have any friends. The ecologist who wants to be converted into a gro-bag for a tree when he dies. (There's an early sequence where Shatner goes into a whole riff about how everything in the universe is connected: from anyone else, you'd assume this was the result of too much jazz tobacco.)

Despite the film being carefully subdivided into chapters, Shatner changes tack so many times within those chapters that it's hard to get a coherent overview of the man. If there's one theme that keeps re-emerging, it's death: Shatner is 92 now, and starting to think about his own personal endgame more and more. But despite this, he still keeps ridiculously active. He has an excellent theory about the key character trait that he shares with Captain James T. Kirk: the constant desire to explore and find out more, with Kirk's death in Generations (whoops, spoiler, sorry) as the ultimate example of him being curious to see what comes next. He sees this as part of his drive to keep his inner child alive, and there's a perfect example of this towards the end, when he finally gets to go on a real spaceship at the age of 90. As his fellow passengers are goofing around in zero gravity, we see Shatner there in the background looking out of the window.

Philippe, as ever, has a battery of clips to illustrate Shatner's words, including what feels like at least one shot from every Star Trek episode ever made. Even the clips that don’t have Shatner in them are gold – notably the one that he chooses to illustrate the actor's fear of forgetting his lines, which is the Lawrence Olivier Oscar acceptance speech where his mind suddenly went blank and he ended up spouting two minutes of improvised word salad, which everyone politely applauded because it was done in Lawrence Olivier's voice. Shatner thinks that's hilarious, which shows how his sense of humour is operating on a different frequency from, say, all the people commenting below the line on that video on YouTube. Maybe You Can Call Me Bill won't give you a coherent view of who William Shatner is: maybe it's enough to just show that he contains multitudes, and leave it at that.